


I Could Not See To See

by litbynosun



Series: TAZ, post-canon [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (It's Kravitz. Kravitz is dead.), Breaking A Lot Of Rules On Humanoid Subject Research, Canonical Character Death, Chronic Illness, F/M, Family Bonding, Gen, Get Vivisected By Your Brother In Law For Fun And Profit, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Mortality, Necromancy Is Just Late Healing, Nongraphic Descriptions of Medical Procedures, Speculation On Undead Physiology, Trivia Tangent Time with Taako, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-01-12 09:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18443606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/litbynosun/pseuds/litbynosun
Summary: Bluejeans, Barry J., Bluejeans, Lup, Highchurch, Merle & McDonald, Angus. (XXXX) "A Case Study on the Physiology of Life After Death and the Physical Expression of the Soul." The Journal of Practical Arcanum, 50 (3), 156-161. https://doi.org/69.420/1000or,A necromancer, an arsonist, and a memory of a dead man walk into a labor,It's like this -- Kravitz has been dead for a very long time, and the world has changed drastically around him while he stayed mostly the same. But he's interacting with living people now, and it's changing his soul, and therefore changing his physical construct.He's more interested in the specifics of his existence now, and he knows a lot of people who are also interested. Fantasy IRB, what fantasy IRB?





	1. I heard a Fly buzz -- when I Died

**Author's Note:**

> This started with three basic ideas -- one, that the idea that Kravitz's warm hands are entirely due to romantic love is really limiting for a show about bonds between all sorts of flavors of relationships; two, Kravitz can canonically materialize only part of his fleshbody so theoretically he could provide easy access to his organs (and is it vivisection if it's consensual and the subject is not technically alive?); and three, running with the idea that Kravitz has "seen more than most adventurers given ten lifetimes" and is very, very old.  
> Title and chapter titles are from Emily Dickinson.  
>  _I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -_  
>  The Stillness in the Room  
> Was like the Stillness in the Air -  
> Between the Heaves of Storm - __

There were little things Kravitz did that were more and more real. Wearing his flesh was becoming natural to him in a way it had not been for a millennium, natural like it was in his first few hundred years of undeath when he was still clinging to a semi-living identity that he later lost to the long unchanging years. He thought he might be becoming more of a _person_ and less of a _personification_. It was an important distinction. Free will, and all that.

Taako liked to take credit for this. But it wasn’t just him, no matter how often he bragged about restarting Kravitz's heartbeat because he was just _that_ sexy. Kravitz was reasonably certain that Taako had stopped his heartbeat as many times as he had kicked it into gear.

Kravitz had _friends_ now. He had people who were _people_ and cared about him; no more spending the time between bounties floating in nothingness, waiting for the brush of the Raven Queen's wings on his cheek. In the past he had existed in something that wasn't sensory deprivation but was more like he had no senses beyond the vague feeling of being cradled in Her hands. He knew, logically, that some of his rests lasted minutes and some a day or so, but always they felt like an eternity and no time at all.

Here on the mortal plane he could rest and still maintain his Self.

Kravitz had once frostbit the tips of his ears, when he was alive and young. Being touched by mortals felt like that. Everything was loud and colorful here on the prime material plane, and when he was alive he'd loved adding to that noise, loved spinning around so that the world blurred into color and only color. Now it was just overwhelming.

Here on the prime material plane Lup tried to give Kravitz a wet willy, which was a terrible experience (and maybe he screamed in an undignified sort of way, but he wasn’t going to admit it) and afterwards she shook her hand out and grimaced.

“Yeesh,” she said. “Mr. Ice Cube over here giving everyone the cold shoulder. Gotta warm you up some.”

And she took the tablecloth off the table and draped it over Kravitz's head and shoulders, fussing a little with it like she was tucking him in.

“I don't have body heat,” he told her. “Blankets work because they trap existing heat and I don't produce any.”

She tilted her head at him, a mannerism he was certain she’d picked up from him deliberately, and then yelled, “New plan!”

Kravitz only barely dropped his flesh before the wave of fire she sent out hit him. The tablecloth crumbled to ashes. Kravitz hoped that she could tell he was glaring at her even though his skeleton wasn't particularly expressive.

He should probably have been more upset than he was, but for some reason this was strangely endearing.

“You can’t just _do_ that!” He put enough skin on again so that he could use eyebrows.

“In my defense, it was entirely on impulse.” She didn't look intimidated. She looked _gleeful_. She patted his fleshy cheek and then stopped.

Her hand was… warm, but not burning, the way it used to burn.

“Holy shit,” she said. “It worked! It _worked!_ I didn't think it would work! Koko, your boy's all toasty!”

“I-I-I don't -- I don't think immolation was the trick,” said Kravitz. Then he added, “Am I really?”

“Would I lie to you?” she asked with a smirk.

He didn't answer, opting instead to form a palm and place it on her face in a mirror of hers. Her cheek, like her hand, was distinctly cooler than he could remember it being

Body heat.

That was… new. He did not quite understand. He let his body fill in around him as he thought.

Taako skidded into the room, braid, scarf, and belt ribbon all flying dramatically behind him. He also slapped a palm onto Kravitz's cheek.

Kravitz considered putting his hand on Taako's cheek too, just for the symmetry, but Taako was on his left and Kravitz's left hand was already touching Lup, which means he'd have to cross his right arm over and that wasn't a particularly natural position.

“Holy shit you're right,” Taako said. “Downright _cozy_ . You did a damn good job, how'd you do it? Research purposes only, natch. Noooot like I wanna _try it._ ”

“Lit him on fire,” Lup grinned.

“Like I said I -- I really don't think the fire was the ticket. Don't think it was the catalyst.”

Lup cocked an eyebrow, perfect red lipstick illuminating her smirk.

“What else but me, Skeletor?”

Kravitz did have a theory, did think she was a part of this. He loved her, and not because she was Taako's sister and you usually have to be friendly with your partner's family. No, she was just someone he'd come to care about independently from their respective relationships with Taako, because she was vibrant and funny and stubborn and part of a wild pile of people who inexplicably seemed to care about him in return.

For centuries he had loved the Raven Queen, and She had never failed him. He did not think She would begrudge him more family.

He decided that this would require further experimentation.

He discovered that the heat did not stay; it came and went and mostly seemed to be affected by whether or not he was being active or interacting with people. It was like blinking, then. He didn't have to blink, but it made people more comfortable if he did, and it was habit by now. He blinked on instinct when something flew towards his face, and his skin heated when he talked about music. His knee jerked when he dropped a book on it, a reflex like any aliveperson had, and when he bounced on his toes to the rhythm of a good song he warmed himself with the spell of the music.

He had it down to an art by the time Carey and Killian got married. It was natural by then to heat his skin. Easy, a simple matter of thought and focus.

* * *

 

The Birds and their associates held reunions every few months. Not all of them held the exact same opinions about how much contact was good contact -- Davenport, alone on his boat, was one extreme, while Taako, Lup, and Barry, who often decided the others were too far away despite sharing a house, were on the extreme opposite end; they all agreed, though, that regular in-person contact was essential.

Usually these gatherings happened at Merlegaritaville, because it was large and best able to recover from the sort of destruction that followed certain members of the Birds around. Messy things happened in Merlegaritaville as a matter of course. Once a moving pictures star had been murdered in the hotel while they were there and it had made Angus's entire _month_.

(Privately, Kravitz thought that if _he_ was going to murder someone he would have waited until the well-known detective was somewhere else, like across the continent, and not a very visible guest of the place, but then again he was not a criminal. He also had no idea what moving pictures actually were -- some sort of scrying spell? But there were moving pictures containing the dead starlet that still played. He had worried about necromancy for a bit, because in his experience nothing was too strange to be somehow necromancy, but Barry had tried to explain the technology to him and had assured him of its lack of reanimation.)

Merle had a big vegetable garden and greenhouse out behind his house. Kravitz didn't garden, mostly because he wasn’t certain how to go about keeping things alive, but somehow on the Spring Visit he and Magnus were conscripted into weeding and various physical labor tasks, which were usually ones where Kravitz didn’t have to actually touch the plants.

“This is _terrible_ ,” Magnus complained. “The genuine worst case scenario.”

“Aren't plants Merle's… thing?” Kravitz asked. “I'd assume that would make this go well.”

“Oh,” Magnus grimaced. “Definitely, definitely his thing. One hundo percent his thing.”

Kravitz waited, not fully understanding why this was bad.

“His _thing_ ,” Magnus repeated, earnestly, wriggling his eyebrows in a way Kravitz couldn't quite interpret.

“Okay,” Kravitz said, accepting it as one of “life’s” great mysteries.

Magnus stuffed a sunhat on his head. Kravitz, after a moment of thought, materialized one for himself.

He had “worn” the same suit for years -- centuries, maybe, if you counted the fact that he always manifested whatever formalwear was in fashion at the time and updated it every decade or so to be more contemporary. Admittedly the transition between tunic and sandals to tie and waistcoat seemed rather dramatic when viewed in its totality, but it was really quite gradual. Wearing his skin should have involved even less conscious choice and effort -- it was just his fleshbody construct, one he’d been curating for one and a half thousand years (give or take).

Oh, he changed his clothes sometimes, when Taako managed to convince him to. But he didn't particularly pay attention to the appearance of his construct. He'd made some modifications, sure -- he’d changed some things almost immediately after he died, and made a few smaller ones over the years. But they were all utilitarian, or cosmetic in a way that appealed to his vanity. The Raven Queen and Taako both assured him that he was very handsome and, while he was _very_ certain that they were both biased, he was also willing to accept that as enough.

The sunhat was nice, though. It shaded his face from the (very bright, there was no brightness like it in the Astral Plane) sun, and it was a nice deep red, because he wanted it to be. He thought he remembered that the pigmentless spots on his body used to burn in the sun much faster than the rest of his skin even took to visibly darken and he didn't want to repeat the experience. Kravitz had not spent large stretches of time in the sun for so long, he couldn't recall what exactly a sunburn was like.  He liked the hat, and it was practical.

He liked it so much that when he followed a visibly reluctant Magnus outside to see Merle elbow deep in some topsoil, he looked at the dirt, at Magnus's sleeveless state, and decided to change something else up too.

A short sleeved shirt? No, not that. A looser button up, maybe. Linen -- he thought that maybe alivepeople liked linen because it kept them cool, but even when he was warming his skin he didn't really overheat. But there was something different this time, when he rolled up his sleeves to his elbows. Two tiny symmetrical pale splotches, blooming down by his wrists. He couldn't remember whether or not they'd been there before -- there were other patches on his forearms and his thumbs and pinky fingers, even bleeding into his palms where they were less visible, and he remembered those.  He knew he'd seen his forearms recently, thought he had even worn a short-sleeved shirt and shorts a month prior. But he didn't remember these particular spots.

The question was answered by Magnus when, with his typical impulsiveness, he snatched Kravitz's left arm and poked the spot.

“That's new!” he said. “It's cool! Do you regularly get more spots?”

“I _did_ ,” said Kravitz, “It started out just around my eyes. But not since I died.”

He very gently retracted his arm. Magnus looked slightly abashed.

Merle emerged from his mass of stems and dirt and peered at Kravitz's arm, too.

“Congratulations on the immune system,” he said, finally. “Even if it's wonky.”

“I don't know what that is,” Kravitz said, apologetically. Everyone had rapidly become used to explaining references.

“It's what protects you from bugs!” said Magnus, cheerfully.

“I don't need protection from bugs,” said Kravitz. “I see an awful lot of them on the daily. They like corpses.”

Merle smacked Mangus with his soulwood arm. “Not _insects_ ,” he explained. “Germs. Little bastards that make you sick.”

“I thought miasma caused disease,” Kravitz said. “I’m sure that's how that works. That theory hasn't gone away since I was alive, and I know people still wrote about it recently, I think I read about it a few centuries ago. And I'm. I'm not _sick_.”

He remembered what _sick_ was -- heat, and swelling, and _tired_. Kravitz was, currently, none of those things.

“Nah,” said Merle. “It's little creatures. I'll show you some sometime. And immune systems do all sorts of shit that makes no goddamn sense, like fucking with your skin.”

“I think I like regular bugs better,” Kravitz replied. A ladybug had crawled off a leaf and was clambering up his forearm, and he watched as it reached his sleeve, ruffled its chitinous wings. When he blew gently on it it took flight, and Kravitz couldn't stop himself from waving goodbye to it.

Magnus, next to him, waved too, much more enthusiastically.

“Come on, boys,” Merle snorted. “This little beauty isn’t going to plant themself, are you, babe?”

Kravitz abruptly remembered why Merle and plants were a problem

“Gross,” Magnus whispered to Kravitz.

“Taako says dinner should be done in an hour,” Kravitz responded. “That’s not so bad…”

Magnus raised his eyebrows at him, and then laughed and clapped Kravitz -- hard -- on the back.

“I like your optimism!” he said cheerily and hefted a huge potted rosebush into his arms.

 

* * *

 

A spate of kidnappings in Waterdeep proved the final piece in the puzzle of a necromancer that had eluded Kravitz for far too long -- a gnome, not committing particularly high-level or dramatic crimes but certainly someone living much longer than they were supposed to. They were escalating their activities rapidly, though, and this was concerning.

Originally, it wasn’t clear whether or not this was a full cult situation, as the kidnappings were swift, silent, and numerous, and there wasn’t much else work that day, so Lup and Barry invited themselves along, as they were prone to do on slow days.

It was better than Susan coming along, anyway. She was all about pragmatism, which was definitely not Kravitz’s style.

The gnome had conscripted much of their family into helping them with their “projects”; conscription, in this case, meant that their family was several hundred years dead and therefore, apparently, free for the taking. They had a lot of thralls.

They weren’t hard to take out, at least not individually. What _was_ hard was the layers of burrow they were forced to navigate to be able to reach the central area and a few nasty booby-traps Barry kept tripping. Lup and Barry had no soul-forms, not like Kravitz did, and they couldn’t phase through anything. They ended up pulling down a lot of walls.

The very center of the burrow had enough room for them to all stand up, though, even Barry. It was dark, messy. The kidnapping victims were all there, too -- victims of more than kidnapping, now.

There was a bandolier with seven bells lying on the table -- necromancer's bells, which Kravitz had been meaning to investigate more now that he had started playing music again. Barry had showed Kravitz the value of knowing your enemy, so to speak, and bells seemed like they could easily be used to bind the dead as well as they could be used to raise it.

This necromancer had probably been a bard, once.

The necromancer turned when they came in, screamed at them. The bodies around the room twitched -- the necromancer must have been a bard _once_ , but were in no state to do anything with that particular skill set beyond the basic.

Barry looked fascinated at the unconscious motion. Lup tugged his cloak discreetly, a warning, a redirection of attention.

Kravitz leveled his scythe at the necromancer, pulled soulfire into his eyesockets.

“You can’t scare me! I'm three hundred years old!” the necromancer yelled. “I can’t die! Not if I don't want to! And none of you ever found me before now! I can hide again. I am a _god_.”

“I've seen finer gods than you, child,” Kravitz said, annoyed now and reminded of his own (former) class, and shed his fleshbody. He possessed the necromancer's cursed dagger, drove it into their heart, and then shifted back and slashed their soul away with his scythe.

He didn't like to do things like that. It messed with the composition of his soul, taking control of objects _that_ infused with necromancy. He had just exposed himself to a lot of radiant damage. But he was annoyed, and tired, and maybe also wanted to show off a little bit.

It seemed to have worked.

“Holy shit, Krav,” said Lup, “that was fuckin’ _metal_ . Fuckin’ _badass_ . Fuckin’ _goth as shit_.”

She was wearing black lipstick and an honest-to-Queen Fantasy Gothic Lolita dress. She looked ethereal and very intimidating. Kravitz trusted her opinion on all things goth implicitly.

“Will -- will we get better at one-liners?” Barry asked. “Is that a skill. A skill you pick up on the job?”

Kravitz sighed. “That was actually a loose translation of a poem I wrote when I was alive. I've always been proud of it. But _really_ , only three hundred? Infant.”

“You wrote emo poetry?” cackled Lup at the same time Barry asked, “Translation?”

Kravitz started rearranging the bodies into something more dignified. An ignoble death, perhaps, but a noble “burial” -- he could at least give them that.

“Yes, I thought I was an artist, it was all very dramatic, I moped,” he said as he worked, knowing from experience that it was better to answer right away than endure days of pestering that would inevitably end with him giving in anyway. “And yes, my version of Common and Modern Common are mutually incomprehensible, it's not badass if they can't understand you.”

“How old _are_ you?” Barry asks after a bit. “If you spoke -- was it Ancient Common that you spoke?”

“My friends, I have abso _lute_ ly no idea,” Kravitz says, “But could you light these notebooks and bodies up? Really -- really toast ‘em good.”

“Oh _fuck_ yeah,” said Lup. “That is definitely the best part.”

She shot a fireball out of one hand and then the other. The bodies went up in flames.

“I wanna hear more about that language of yours,” Barry said as they watched her work. Kravitz could almost visualize the gears whirring in his head. “Not for. Y'know. Research purposes and all that. Just want to get to know my brother-in-law a bit. And all.”

“Not married,” Kravitz protested weakly. He could feel his cheeks heat (another new sensation) and hoped it was too dark in the room for that to show. “Also possibly not legally recognized a person. I'm not exactly a _citizen_ , Barry.”

“Well,” Lup yelled back, “We're all literal aliens, who gives a shit? Better get on that, bone boy!”

Kravitz was _definitely_ sporting darkened cheeks now.

“Anyway,” he said, trying to return to a slightly less embarrassing subject, “I memorized a lot of songs written by other people, too, I should see how much I remember. It could be historically interesting, I don’t know how much was preserved.”

Barry shrugged. “I don’t know either, but I _do_ know who knows their way around a library.”

 

Angus McDonald, at thirteen years old, was in his second and final year of college. His room, while impressively organized, contained about as many books as a library four times its size. It was not that any unneeded floor space has been buried, but more that it had been repurposed as storage space for various glassware in strange and bewildering shapes.

His room at home was not much better; his collection of notebooks impressed even Lucretia, and Taako bought him the entirety of the special edition, shiny hardback Caleb Cleveland series that Angus kept beside his original and slightly battered set, while Lup provided various texts she’d stolen from the homes of bounties.

“Heya, Ango!” Lup called as they stepped through a rift into the boy’s room. “Who’s my favorite nibling?”

“I’m your only one, ma’am,” said Angus placidly, enduring the hair ruffle she gave him. He jumped a little in surprise when the rip opened, but calmed down immediately.

“Gotta present for you, little man,” she said. “Kravitz is gonna recite some poetry.”

“What sort of poetry, sir?” asked Angus.

“His poetry!”

“I will _not_ ,” said Kravitz, “But I remember some of what was popular at the time. We were actually wondering --”

“You told us we wouldn’t understand it anyway,” Barry chimed in. “Why are you shy about your art?”

“Most of it was terrible and does not bear repeating,” Kravitz said. “Wondering if you knew where to find books on ancient languages?”

“Why would we not understand it?” asked Angus.

“We didn’t speak the same language when I was alive,” Kravitz explains. “Old Common and New Common are mostly mutually unintelligible. I just want library help, this is not a performance--”

They all ignored him in favor of staring eagerly at him.

“Poetry! Poetry!” Lup began, and Kravitz cut her off before she could start a chant.

“ _Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard / Meotodes meahte ond his modgeþanc, / weorc Wuldorfæder; swa he wundra gehwæs / ece Drihten, or onstealde.”_

“You’re right!” Angus was delighted. “I understood none of that!” He pulled a notebook and pen from the top of his desk.

“Pretty bomber tho,” Lup grinned. “What’s it mean?”

“It’s a prayer,” Kravitz explained, “to the god of subcreation.”

“How about Middle Common?” Angus said, excitedly. He did not seem phased at all by not understanding a word of the last poem. “Do you know any poems in Middle Common?”

“ _SIÞen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye, / Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez_ ,” said Kravitz.

Angus vibrated in place, grinning, so Kravitz continued.

 _“Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt / Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe._ ”

“I think I kinda get it,” said Angus. “I can hear where modern words come from!”

“I’m surprised you remember so much,” said Barry. Kravitz could see the gears in his brain whirring. “You say you don’t recall much of your life? Does undeath lessen the ability to recall episodic memories but maintain most semantic memories?”

“He remembers how to do most tasks,” Angus added thoughtfully, “Even tasks he hasn’t done in what seems to be a millennium. So his procedural memory is intact.”

“You know I can read and write! I know the names of things, even though it’s all new now,” Kravitz said, slightly offended. “I was a bard and can still do… bard stuff. I can still play magic music.”

“Explains why you were enough of a nerd to memorize poetry,” Lup ribbed. “But I assume semantic memory is kinda a job requirement.”

“I'm very glad you know the names of things, sir,” Angus deadpanned.

“Holy shit, I nearly missed that,” Lup cackled. “Bone boy knows what a noun is! He can read!” She laughed so hard that she was almost doubled over.

Kravitz, despite himself, laughed too, half at himself, half because Angus was grinning and Lup was belly laughing and Barry was making that weird clicking noise in the back of his throat that probably signaled amusement. They all seemed to build off each other; soon he fell into a full body laugh, one that made his locs bounce and his chest hurt. And then he started coughing, and couldn't stop coughing, and _that_ hurt his chest quite badly, and he pulled his fleshbody off in a bit of a panic.

Skeletons can’t cough, because they have no airways. It was perhaps a bit extreme, but he was safe for now.

His family exchanged glances but didn't comment.

“Library, please,” Kravitz said, eager to move on.

“Sure,” said Angus, opening the door. “It's just across the quad. Although this is mostly a magic and science school, I don’t know how much information you’ll find. Maybe I’ll ask Ren if I can look in her library over the weekend. But this actually explains a lot, sir!”

“It does?” asked Barry, audibly curious.

“Mr. Kravitz uses certain phrases that a native speaker wouldn’t think to,” Angus explained. “He also has a distinct way of pronouncing vowels even when not adopting a false accent, but I couldn’t match it with any current languages, but it would make sense in the context of his age! About five hundred years ago there was a rapid linguistic evolution --”

“I remember that!” Kravitz interrupted. “People changed how they said vowels! All of a sudden! Oh, it was so _frustrating_!”

Angus got that look on his face like he was trying to keep from laughing. Kravitz grumbled.

Barry patted his back consolingly.

 

The library was not much help. Angus took them to the history section, and the foreign languages section, and the linguistics section, and scrolled through a large volume of microfiche before announcing defeat.

Lup and Barry, long since bored, had each found a book and a reading nook and had their heads bent together. Kravitz, anxious and jangled, still sparking a little with residual necromantic energy, alternated between hovering at Angus’s shoulder and pacing the stacks.

Eventually Angus clicked the light off and shook his head.

“There’s nothing really useful here,” he said, pushing back from his chair and standing. “Lucas doesn’t care much about the humanities side of things, you know? I’m coming home over the weekend; I can ask Miss Ren then.”

“Ren’s eating dinner with us tonight,” Kravitz told him, “If you want to come home with us I can drop you off back here in the morning.”

Angus clapped his hands and grinned at him. “Oh, that would be wonderful! I’ve recently had a bit of an accident in my kitchenette and I really prefer to avoid the cafeteria. Do you know what’s for dinner?”

“It’s Ren, so something fried,” Kraviz shrugged, gently ushering him over to the armchairs holding Lup and Barry. 

“I am a teenager, sir!” Angus said, cheerily. “Teenagers need fried food.”

“And lots of it!” said Lup. “You can’t be a teen without a hollow leg, Ango.” 

She’d pulled off her shoes, hat, and other frankly ridiculously impractical accessories sometime in the last hour, and swung them over her shoulder by their ribbons as she shook Barry out of his laser-focused book stupor. 

Kravitz opened a rift into their living room and, with minimal amounts of shuffling, they all piled through.

The house smelled like oil and garlic and sauteed onions; Ren was dipping batter-coated pickles in a sizzling pot while Taako scraped potato peels off a cutting board into their compost bin. 

Taako turned, and saw Angus, and his eyes widened. 

“The TA degins to return!” he yelled, and Angus grinned. 

Then it was all warm chaos and about five welcome home kisses and a flurry of tableware and place settings.

“How'd you manage to bring my magic boy home?” Taako asked eventually. “Not that I'm not glad he's back from that hideous parody of an educational institution, natch, but normally I can never pull him away on weekdays.”  The pan in his hands tilted dangerously, like his bad arm was tiring -- he elbowed Ren's anxious hands away and placed it on the table.

“We're actually here for Miss Ren!” Angus said cheerily. “I had a library request for her.”

“It's  _ my _ library,” Taako huffed and flopped into his chair. 

“We know,” Ren soothed. “You know you can use the library any time,” she added, to Angus. “What specifically were you looking for?”

“Information on Ancient Common,” Kravitz said. “Anything you have, really, but maybe things on grammar and pronunciation.”

“Oh, we have a history section for sure!” Ren exclaimed. “Whatcha want that for, though?”

“So Krav can get all nostalgic about his emo phase,” Lup said. “I’ll show ya. Hey Krav, what's this?”

Kravitz squinted at the object. “A pen?”

“Pen,” Lup corrected.

“That's what I said!” Kravitz replied. He had a sense of where this was going. 

“Nah, you said ‘pin’,” Taako rolled his eyes. “Wait, I know what this is about! Why you persistently call that one prof ‘Windy,’ right?”

“You mean the illusionist professor Wendy?” Ren asked.

“That's the one,” Taako said. “You're telling me -- YOU'RE TELLING ME -- that the reason I have to deal with shit like ‘pinultoomate’ is that you're old enough to speak a dead language?”

Kravitz sputtered, flustered, and then forced himself to recover. “It's not dead, it just -- evolved! And. And I know her name!”

“Aww, he's sensitive about this, let him be,” said Barry, wonderful Barry, the only nice one of Kravitz's family.

“Technically the vowel shift happened recently enough that some of the older elves could also be affected,” said Angus, calmly, “But yes. It took quite a while for me to understand that when he kept offering me 'swaights’ he meant candy.”

“That's what you call them!  _ It's what you call them _ !”

“Sweets, babe,” Lup said. “They're sweets.”

“Whatever,” Kravitz said. “I'm leaving. Get it all out of your systems, blah blah, you livingpeople don't even bother with noun declension, you don't have  _ vocatives _ . I'm out.” He left his plate behind with minimal regret. He was jangled already, and his family never knew when to lay off.

“Sorry, sir,” Angus called after him. “You do make it very easy to goof!”

“We'll stop,” Taako offered, seeming to realize they'd gone too far. 

Kravitz eyed him suspiciously, already out of his chair. “No more japes?”

“ _ Japes _ ,” mouthed Lup to Barry.

“Nope,” Taako said, glaring at her. “Serve the potatoes, Mr. Iron Age.”

“Not from the Iron Age,” Kravitz corrected, then pulled the lid off the potatoes.

The steam hit him in the face. He breathed it in, and then he was off again, big coughs bringing moisture to his eyes, and then he had to leave,  _ now _ .

 

Kravitz's method of escape was slipping back to the Astral Plane to rest. It was quieter there, dimmer, less overwhelming. He liked the Prime Material Plane, he did, but it wasn’t  _ home _ anymore, at least not in the way the Astral Plane was.

The Raven Queen called him soon after he merged with the grayness, and he went to her eagerly.

It wasn't like he was seeking comfort with her or anything like that. He was working, really he was. Some worshipper had left a lovely lacquer moon-shaped hair stick as an offering to the Raven Queen, and She had thought it would look good on Kravitz, which meant it was A Payday, and She hadn't been quite this excited for A Payday in quite some time. It was really a very pretty trinket, and one he was entirely planning to keep on his person instead of on his mathom-shelf, next to the little mirrors that caught the light, the panels of stained glass.

He let the Queen preen through his hair as he pulled the thought of his legs into his chest, considering. He was old enough, had been dead long enough, that She did not bother with a throne room or a room at all, just let them both hang suspended in the gray mists of death.

**MY KRAVITZ** , She said, sliding the stick into the half-bun She'd settled on pulling his locs into,  **SOMETHING TROUBLES YOU. TELL ME.**

“I was reminded today of how I died,” he told Her, open and honest with Her as he always was. Kravitz was older than almost anything else existing, but before his goddess he still felt like a child.

**YES** , she said, removing a few of his earrings and replacing them with others, also new acquisitions. (Sometimes Kravitz felt guilty about being vain enough that he’d affected the default offerings left at Her temples, but only sometimes.)   **I REMEMBER. YOU WERE PLAYING A HYMN TO ME WHEN YOUR AIRWAYS BEGAN TO CLOSE. YOU THOUGHT TO WAIT IT OUT AND SAT ON THE STEPS TO MY TEMPLE. IT WAS THE BEST SACRIFICE I HAVE YET RECEIVED.**

Kravitz remembered, too. He remembered the panic that never left him, the noises he could hear emanating from his own chest, the way he had tried to boil water for the usual remedy using a tune played on his lap dulcimer but had not succeeded. He remembered the way he had wondered, darkly, what the person who found his body would think -- someone so clearly marked for the Queen, dead on Her doorstep with no signs of a struggle or clear cause of death. He remembered the ravens that fluttered down to surround him as his eyesight had dimmed, the fly that landed on his nose.

He was struck, suddenly, by the realization that She did not know. Surrounded by death though She was and had been and is and would be, She could not know the way his eyes had watered every time his throat tightened, the way the coughs had echoed through his chest and made it sore for days, the lightheaded feeling of panic that came with not receiving enough air. It was a strange feeling, the sensation of being sent adrift. Kravitz did not know which way was up, featureless as his surroundings were. He did not know who to confide in.

The Queen began to sing, Her voice like thunder and the beatings of a thousand wings, and Kravitz joined Her.

**NIL SA SAOL SEO ACH CEO.**

It was the song he had played to charm a nearby raven into helping him with the water, suffocating that warm summer day. It was a hymn, for Her.    
_ Is ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr.  _

_ There is nothing in this life but mist, and we will only be alive for a short time. _

* * *

He didn't keep track of how long he was gone -- time was strange in that gray fuzzy place, and now that he was no longer the lone employee of the Raven Queen he wasn't sent to chase down anyone.

Mostly he drifted, literally senseless, and sometimes spoke with the Raven Queen as she made small adjustments to his construct. But eventually he settled enough to go home -- not quite enough for his fleshbody, but close, enough for bones and the occasional fingertip.

Taako was clingy when he got back, followed Kravitz around the house like a lost duckling.

“Is something wrong?” Kravitz asked eventually.

“You were gone for a month, my dude,” Taako said, seriously. “Lup ‘n Barry said you were with the Raven Queen the whole time, but --”

Kravitz winced. “Is a month a long time to be gone?”

Taako nodded, pulled Kravitz closer roughly, hands like burning irons as he hooked them around Kravitz’s scapulae and yanked. “It's a real long time.” 

Kravitz tilted his head, thinking. “I was upset,” he said. “I needed the time. But I can -- contact you somehow, next time. I am not really fully formed, while there, but … I will try.”

Taako ran his fingers down Kravitz's ribcage and nodded. Then he took a breath.

“Sorry 'bout teasing you,” he said. “You just make it easy, s'all.”

“Yes, well,” Kravitz said. “You don't exactly have a normative cadence either. Kinda hypocritical, dontcha think?”

“Mine’s from where I’m from, though, and yours is  _ when _ you’re from,” Taako said. “But that doesn’t really matter. I’m tryna apologise for upsetting you.”

“And you want me to appreciate that, I see. Apology accepted. It's not why I left, though. It wasn't the only thing I was upset about.”

“Want to talk about it?” Taako offered.

Kravitz thought about this briefly. He was upset about one death, when he knew Taako had experienced dying far more times than anyone should. It wasn't a fair thing to put on him.

“No, I don't think so,” he said. “Just remembered something.”

Taako nodded, rotated Kravitz’s lower arm gently to watch the movement of his radius and ulna. 

Kravitz, lungless, felt like he was suffocating.

 

Kravitz decided to just not breathe when he was in fleshform. It usually made livingpeople more comfortable when he did, but was very much a choice.

This lasted about two hours before the twins cornered him in the living room and told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off.

“Your talking sounds  _ real _ weird,” Taako told him. He collapsed dramatically on the couch, presumably to draw attention away from the stiff way he stretched his legs out in front of him. Lup nodded vigorously in the background. “Please take a breath at regular intervals I am  _ begging _ you, you are worse than NO-3113 was when it comes to talking like a person and she was a  _ literal robot _ .”

“I'm fairly certain Noelle thought of herself as alive,” Kravitz said, “While I am certainly comfortable in being very much  _ literally dead _ .” He did not breathe as he said this.

“ _ Istus _ no, you creepy creepy boy creep,” said Taako. He inhaled, deliberately. “Try it. Just a little. Trust me, I'll make it up to you.” He winked.

“Gross,” said Lup. “Negative reinforcement from me, homie. Bad cop, sexy cop. Try it.”

Kravitz did try it, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. There was pollen dripping from the plants, because it was spring, and cool winds blew debris and chilled air in his face, and he choked on the inhale and was off coughing again, until tears were running down his face.

Taako looked very alarmed, which for Taako comprised a series of hastily repressed facial expressions smashed into a clearly contrived flat affect. Lup disappeared off into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water and several napkins.

Kravitz accepted both gratefully and eventually settled into a soft wheezing.

“Prob’ly just a real nasty cold,” Taako said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Better beef up that immune system, homie, eat some yogurt.”

“Yogurt?” Kravitz said, confused. “Merle told me about the immune system. He said it protected people from evil little creatures that cause disease. I thought he might be joshing me, but he didn’t mention yogurt. Also I don't have a cold. This just happens.”

“Oh, yeah, natch,” Lup replied. “You need a gut microbiome and all that. Bet all the little germs in you are tiny zombies too.”

“Not -- I'm not a zombie,” Kravitz said. “I still think you're pulling my leg. That's not a  _ word _ .”

“What happened to knowing the names of things?” Taako winked. Kravitz winced -- he should have suspected Lup would tell on him.

“‘Gut microwhatsit’ sounds so fake,” he complained. “Made-up newfangled bullshit. I don't think I  _ want _ to know what it means.” 

“Come on,” said Taako, levering himself off the couch and taking a minute to steady himself. He grabbed Kravitz's hand and pulling him towards the kitchen. “Tea time. Lemon ginger with honey, maybe? I think Lup drank all the nice mint and I can never get the flavor right.”

“Hey, if you're in charge of grocery shopping and you don't buy something that's  _ your _ problem, brobro,” Lup shot back. “Also what does a wizard have to do to get a decent microscope around here?”

“Are there microscopes here?” Taako asked, seemingly to the world at large.

“I've never heard of them,” Kravitz said, honestly.

“Which means either they're under two hundred years old or don't exist yet,” Lup laughed. “You're old as shit, dude. You're out of touch.”

Taako pulled Kravitz's hand harder and parked him in front of the shelf of tea tins and then went to boil some water.

“Rosemary raspberry lemon for me,” he called. “And I’ve decided on thyme for you, and grab the honey.”

“You're just picking for me?” Kravitz asked. “What about Lup?” 

“Thyme's good for cough, and you've lost rights by not breathing. Lup's lost rights for existing so she can make her own tea.”

“Fair,” Kravitz. He didn't mention that Taako picked a pain reliever for himself -- if he was having a bad pain day he'd either talk about it or not. Kravitz worried, though.

He put fiterbags in their respective mugs and then, after a brief moment to think, slipped some thyme tea into his pocket, and made a mental note to see if Merle had echinacea and liquorice. 

It didn't hurt to be prepared. He'd carried little packets of herbs to steam with him in life. He could do it again.

He flexed his hands as Taako poured the kettle. No swelling knuckles. He was fine.


	2. And Breaths were gathering firm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry has ideas, and those ideas involve Kravitz's cooperation. They also involve dubiously ethical research procedures.  
> Angus expands his skill set and possibly misuses his academic standing.  
> Kravitz seeks self-knowledge and bends to the whims of a mad scientist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that this has descriptions of The Procedure itself -- it's not super graphic but organs are mentioned. There's no blood and everyone's safe, but it's worth a warning. All very scientific. I feel weird clarifying this but I think there is a kink about this out there, so this is... entirely platonic and information-based vivisection. The section starts with "they cleared off a hardwood lab bench," and I'll include a summary at the bottom.
> 
>  
> 
> _The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -_  
>  And Breaths were gathering firm  
> For that last Onset - when the King  
> Be witnessed - in the Room - 

A month was more than enough time for Angus to thoroughly peruse the library that was nominally Taako’s but mostly run by Ren. He had left a stack of books on Kravitz’s bedside table, and Kravitz devoured them all in practically record time. There were small mentions of Old Elven, but the language had changed only slightly since then. Kravitz's father had spoken a drow dialect, slightly different from Standard Elven, and there were few mentions of that.

He didn’t learn very much. In fact, he explained, at length, all the inaccuracies in them to Taako, who only half-ironically wrote every criticism into a letter and sent it off to Ren’s office. “I don’t know what you expect me to do about this,” she wrote back. Taako grumbled something about knowingly permitting misinformation to spread but allowed the books to return to the library.

He’d hand-picked each transmutation book in the curriculum of his school as well as most of the contents of that section of the library, Kravitz knew, enlisted every other Bird to supervise their particular school of magic. It was somewhat endearing, this small, strange bit of naiveté Taako still seemed to hold on to, that desire he had to be entirely correct in all his doings, even ones that only barely pertained to him. Pride in his work.

There was one thing about the books, though. Extrapolating from the evidence, Angus had lowballed in his estimate of “a millennium old” -- judging by his mother tongue, he was approximately fifteen hundred years old. Ten times older than he could have lived, and an existence filled with the most unusual experiences possible with few instances of mundanity. The weight of the things he'd seen had seemed so useful, in the past. Now it weighed on him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about this, but it didn’t feel correct. Time had long since stopped meaning much to him, and he wasn’t sure whether he had assumed he was older or younger. He had seen so much and changed so little. It made him wonder about things he’d never really thought about before.

He had replaced the previous Grim Reaper, and could never quite forget it; Susan, possessed of considerably more temporal freedom than Kravitz, made a habit of slipping in from the past to visit and spoke about her grandfather’s methods at length, as well as her own experiences with the job. The Raven Queen would allow him to retire when he chose to. She would pick another for the job -- Barry and Lup could continue without him, or, if they retired earlier, She could find someone new. He just couldn’t imagine ever wanting to retire. He could imagine the characteristics of his replacement -- someone beautiful, fastidious, loyal, likely with either vitiligo like Kravitz or Waardenburg Syndrome like Susan -- but he couldn’t see himself leaving Her.

* * *

 

Kravitz really needed to take a step back if he has started finding Barry's weird experiments and questions endearing. He came to this conclusion when Barry approached him with a battered notebook in hand and Kravitz, entirely erroneously, gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“You can be half flesh and half skeleton,” Barry started, “so can you… manifest only half of your organs? Like, seeing only half of your chest cavity? ”

“I don't, uh, I don't like where this is going,” Kravitz told him, regretting those fuzzy thoughts of thirty seconds ago.

“I just thought I could look at your lungs!” Barry said.

“Are you asking to _vivisect_ me?” asked Kravitz, alarmed but somehow not surprised.

“Does it count--” Barry started.

“YES!” said Kravitz. “And honestly wanting to study me because I'm dead is edging dangerously close to necromancy. You _know_ the rules on necromancy. It's not, uh, not very. Very cash money of you.” He did not know if he was using that slang right but he also didn’t care.

“But if it's _consensual_ ,” Barry pressed. “And maybe if we figure out what's up we can fix it. Personally I’m assuming it’s asthma but you never know until you check, right?”

Kravitz sighed and the breath came out as a whistle.

Barry looked eager. He looked _enthusiastic_. He was also the largest in the family, wider than Kravitz, taller than the twins, and old enough that Angus still had some catching up to do (though, with the way the boy ate, it probably wouldn’t be long), and blocking the only exit. Kravitz knew it was definitely not on purpose, but still.

“I'll -- I'll make you a deal,” said Kravitz eventually.

“Oh?” Barry said.

“I don't know what to get you for your birthday,” Kravitz confessed. “I'll let you do this instead.”

Barry nodded. “Deal,” he said, and they shook on it.

Their hands were about the same temperature.

Barry brought it up again just before breakfast a few days later, looking up from his planner notebook and tapping Kravitz’s wrist with a pen to gain his attention.

“Do you mind if Merle joins in? Seems like something he'd be interested in,” he said.

Kravitz considered this. “I guess that's fine,” he said eventually. “A lil bit strange, though. A group project?”

The twins had perked up considerably. Lup, who was balancing a tub of brown sugar on her head and raisins and craisins in her hands, dumped an entire load of oatmeal toppings on the table so she could slap her palms on the hard surface. Angus, looking barely awake, jolted slightly at the noise and she patted his head in apology

“Planning something?” she asked, eager. “Do tell!”

“Yeah, Barry, whatcha plotting with my man?” Taako yelled from the stove.

“We-ell,” Barry started, “You know how Kravitz is freaked enough about his breathing that --”

“Whoa, whoa,” Kravitz interrupted. “I am not. I am not _freaked_. I just --”

All three of the adults started to talk over him. Angus gave a bone-shuddering yawn and flipped his spoon around listlessly.

“I do think it contributed to me dying, is all!” Kravitz said, louder, trying to be heard. “Maybe! Maybe cause of death is not all that interesting to you but!”

“No, no,” said Lup, “Deffo much less interested in some things now. Anyway, you're both avoiding the subject. _Whatcha planning_?”

“A simple vivisection,” said Barry, as Kravitz said, “Barry's birthday present.”

The twins stared at them, looked at each other, and then looked back at them. Angus’s head whipped up from where it was almost dangling into his oatmeal.

“You mean Kravitz is gonna go kidnap a rando for Barry to experiment on?” Taako asked.

“More like Barry's kidnapping _me_ to experiment on,” Kravitz said.

“Consensually,” Barry added.

The twins looked at each other again. Taako's ears and eyebrows were sky high. Lup was grinning.

“Hell yes,” she said. “ _Hellllll_ yes.”

“May I join?” asked Angus, vibrating slightly in place, no longer bleary-eyed. “Oh, please, I've done so few practical experiments in biothaumaturgy -- biothanaturgy? Would this be biothanaturgy? I could take notes!”

Kravitz looked at Barry, who shrugged. “Your choice, boss,” he said. “Ethics, and all that.”

 _Says the lich_ , Kravitz thought, but did not say. Instead, he said, “You're certainly welcome to participate. You'll cancel out Merle's influence.”

Angus grinned.

 

They didn’t spend a lot of time having structured discussions about it, but it came up often in conversation. Both “Barry ’n Lup” and Angus began dedicating notebooks to the plan, asking Kravitz various questions -- how much control he had over his autonomic functions (not much; often they kicked in with strong emotions) and other specific questions. When Kravitz mentioned that he thought he might periodically be actually digesting food, Barry asked him uncomfortably detailed questions about what happened to food he _didn’t_ digest, and at what point he thought his gastrointestinal system _stopped_ functioning. Kravitz’s sympathetic nervous system decided that this would be a great time to make his face flush, which did unfortunate things for his vanity-- not for the first time he cursed the lack of pigment around his eyes, because the rash spreading outward from his nose and the rush of blood to his cheeks showed up far more there than they would have on most other parts of his body.

“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore,” he said, finally.

“I have something to talk about!” Angus chirped. “I started drafting an FIRB proposal and —”

“FIRB?” Kravitz asked.

“We don’t need FIRB,” said Barry.

“We _do_ need FIRB, if we’re going to publish!”

“What’s FIRB?” Kravitz repeated.

“Fantasy Institutional Review Board, they govern humanoid subject research,” Lup whispered.

“They’re. They’re just not likely to approve it,” Barry shrugged. “Do first, ask permission later. That’s m-my motto.”

“Listen,” Lup said, “Normally I’d be all up in that shit, you know that, but babe — you really think anyone on this planet’s gonna tell _us_ no?”

“She does have a point,” Kravitz said. “And I am, uh, a humanoid subject. I would prefer the traditional route.”

“I’m publishing this shit if you won’t, Bear,” Lup said. “Me n’ Ango’ll be the darling of the peer reviewed journals community, you’ll see.”

Barry sighed. “Fine.” He paused, then added, strangely petulant, “But it’s _my_ birthday present.”

“I’ll write the proposal, sir,” Angus assured him. “Get it submitted as soon as I can!”

 

They ended up extending a sort of blanket invitation, mostly to the Birds, who were as a general rule the sort of people who would enjoy this sort of thing.

Merle was, as expected, performatively reluctant but easy to convince. He liked Kravitz far more than anyone would have ever expected. Kravitz also suspected he wanted a chance to do some healing-related things without the burden of having to worry about anyone dying.

Magnus said no, because he had a new litter of puppies to care for and was also trying to match a few people with the perfect service dog for them. Davenport was out at sea.

Lucretia bowed out gracefully, ostensibly because she was busy but also possibly responding to the stubborn set of Taako’s mouth when they’d asked her. She had, however, pulled out a large, beautiful leather-bound book along with a smaller paperback. They had upon closer inspection proved to be a gorgeously illustrated anatomy text, which Lucretia claimed had been her “hobby” during the Voidfish years, as well as a brief primer on scientific illustration. She’d handed them both to Angus, and his lean teenager muscles bunched under their weight.

“If you’re doing scribe work,” she said to him, “You need to be able to write and draw quickly, and there’s a number of tricks you can use to improve your speed. Try tracing existing scientific drawings. You’ll want a few pens, too.” Then she turned to the rest of them. “You had better send me this report when you’re done, I’d love to file it somewhere.”

“ _File it somewhere,”_ Taako mimicked, voice airy.

Angus and Lup both gave him a Look. Taako settled.

“Thank you so much, ma’am!” Angus said. “I can’t wait to pick up a new skill!”

She smiled at them all, awkward, and then Taako was leaving the room, so Kravitz waved and followed him out.

“I wanna go home,” Taako said. “Take me home.”

Kravitz did.

Later, he saw Angus practicing his drawings at the kitchen table, spines and muscles and eyeballs. Taako was sitting next to him, alternating between peering over his shoulder and focusing on the book, finger following the lines written in the book like he always did when reading.

Kravitz was proud of him. It was a step forward.

 

The final person they talked to was the Raven Queen.

Barry and Lup had actual bodies, so the Queen always manifested an actual hall for them, instead of the gray directionless mists she favored for her time with Kravitz alone.

They let Barry do the talking, the Queen’s beaked face impassive.

“KRAVITZ’S BODY IS ENTIRELY CONSTRUCTED, A PROJECTION OF HIS SOUL,” she said, eventually. “MUTABLE, CHANGING AS HIS PERCEPTION OF HIMSELF CHANGES. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU WILL FIND. THE CONTENTS OF HIS SOUL ARE KNOWN TO ME BUT I CANNOT CONTROL THE SHAPE.”

It was not explicit permission, but permission was implied. Barry and Lup bowed and Lup opened a portal to leave. Kravitz didn’t follow them; the Queen pulled lightly on the core of his being and he approached her. She tugged him close; She did not move, not visibly, but Her wings rustled on all sides of him.

“MY KRAVITZ,” She said. “YOU HAVE CHANGED. YOU ARE RESTLESS. I WISH YOU PEACE.”

“I think this might give me some,” said Kravitz, and she smoothed the sapphire blue ribbon he used to tie back his hair.

* * *

They ended up doing what had come to be called The Experiment (Barry clarified that it was not an experiment so much as it was a case study, but Taako and Lup shouted him down) about two months later, in a small laboratory in the basement of one of Lucas Miller's university buildings. 

They chose this particular location because Taako felt bad about lying to Ren, who had read the research proposal and then explicitly forbid hosting The Experiment on the grounds of _their_ School of Magic. She was not swayed by the argument that they had achieved FIRB approval.

(“She's smarter than me so I gotta stay on her good side,” Taako had insisted repeatedly, as though someone was going to write the gossip rags to tell them that Taako YouKnowFromTeeVee had actual friends whose opinion he actually cared about.)

None of them had such compunctions when it came to Lucas. Frankly, Kravitz didn't like the man all that much either, so he was fine with that. In any case, the man had already committed several death crimes; Kravitz imagined that this wouldn’t disturb him all that much.

Another benefit was Angus's student researcher and thesis privileges. He had a lab bench all to himself by then, one covered in experiments from all seven schools of magic. Taako claimed he could score Angus a whole lab if he changed allegiances, to which Angus responded that he'd consider it as soon as Taako stopped calling him a traitor.

They stepped through a rift in front of Angus’s dorm room. He was waiting there, nose stuck in a book, and looked up and beamed when they arrived.

“Hey, hey, it's Anju,” said Taako, “How's it hanging, little man?”

“Sir,” reproached Angus, voice laden with resignation yet determined put up a fair fight anyway.

“Anju McPear, moon's tiniest detective,” Taako barreled onwards.

“Taako, I'm thirteen and nearly as tall as you,” Angus said. “I saw you yesterday, don't pretend like we never talk. Also, we're not on the moon.”

Merle, distinctly shorter than Angus, huffed and crossed his arms. “Still plenty tiny,” he said.”Where’s this lab of yours?”

“Right downstairs,” said Angus. “Some other people might come in and out, but I did put up a warning sign that things would get a little strange today!”

“My boy’s so considerate,” said Taako to Lup.

“Well _you_  certainly didn’t teach him that,” said Lup to Taako.

“Can we go?” asked Kravitz. He was the kind of anxious that made him want to run circles for a bit to get off the energy.

“Sure! It’s right this way,” said Angus.

They cleared off a hardwood lab bench, covered it in some paper, and directed Kravitz to vanish his shirt and his skin and muscle. They found out quite quickly that Kravitz didn’t quite have the control to be able to do that; he just turned all skeleton when he tried. Eventually, he vanished everything in the ventral side of his abdomen, including the top half of his lungs and parts of his stomach and liver. This was deemed acceptable.

Taako, who’d been pacing slightly, hopped up on a different lab table for a better look, swinging his legs and chewing his lower lip. When he noticed Kravitz watching him he smoothed out his face, flipped his hair, and looked away.

“You ready, bud?” asked Barry.

“As I’ll ever be,” Kravitz said.

“Start in the middle of the left lung,” Merle directed. Barry obeyed and reached in under Kravitz's ribcage.

“Look at that,” said Barry, almost immediately. “Look at the changes in lung tissue, that’s incredible. Angus, you see that? How small these airways are?” He stuck his face a little bit too close to Kravitz’s exposed viscera, and Lup gently pushed him back.

Merle said, “Yeesh. That’s not asthma,bud. Not just asthma, anyway.”

Angus nodded vigorously, taking detailed notes. Kravitz wondered how important it was for him personally to stay focused here, but he did perk up a little at Lup's next words.

She lit her palm up bright, held it over another spot in Kravitz’s abdomen. “Look,” she said, “It’s not the only organ with those types of changes, see here?”

Kravitz lifted his head up slightly, tried to see where she was gesturing,but Angus pushed him gently down again. “It’s best not to move too much,” he said. “You can look at my notes, though!”

Kravitz did. Angus was fast — he’d drawn a set of paired lung tissue already, one with what Kravitz recognized as alveoli and one that, even to his unpracticed eye, just looked weird.He moved on to do another pair of drawings as Kravitz watched, which appeared to be kidneys, one of which had visibly darker lines.

Kravitz let the talk wash over him for a bit, passively observing them work. Lup kept up a constant stream of talk which Angus seemed to be taking down in shorthand, but Kravitz heard too many words he didn’t know and tuned most of it out. He was used to seeing lots of organs in his work, lots of the inner workings of bodies. But it was much more an occupational hazard, something to be cleaned up, than something he knew much about.

Lup eventually disappeared and, after some rummaging in a closet, reappeared with a preserved lung, smelling strongly of formaldehyde. Kravitz’s comfort with the procedure abruptly dipped.

Barry prodded around a bit in the preserved lungs, lifting a few alveoli and muttering. Angus's pen skittered across the page. Merle, almost absent-mindedly, grew a few blooms of belladonna on his arm -- Kravitz remembered, suddenly, crushing up the flowers and experimenting with steam and smoke. No definitive memories, no images or sounds, just the sudden knowledge of what medical care was like when he was… young.

“Ephedra, too,” he said.

“Huh?” asked Merle, possibly joshing him and possibly genuinely needing a repeat.

“Ephedra,” Kravitz said, “For tea.”

“Pringles had some ephedra potions, I think,” Merle mused.

“ _Nope,_ no, not ever talking to him again,” Kravitz said. Pringles had said too many things that, while they would have been light and joking were they to come from Taako, were genuinely disturbing coming from him.

He was saved from having to think more about this when Barry, seemingly deciding to cross-reference once again, put down the preserved lungs and reached once again to touch Kravitz's constructed ones. He did not wash or wipe his hands.

Kravitz stuck a palm flat to Barry's chest to keep him away.

“No formaldehyde is going in my body, Barold,” he said, sternly.

Merle snorted, mutters something about bad things to get drunk on. Kravitz, secure in his knowledge that many types of alcohol are fatal, ignored him.

“ _Yeah, Barold,”_ chorused Taako and Lup in mocking unison.

Barry washed his hands rapidly and dived back in.

The door of the lab opened and a tiefling, presumably another student, poked their head in. 

"Hey, McDonald," they started, and then seemed to notice what was happening.

They let out a squeak. Kravitz waved in an attempt to reassure them, but it was not helpful.

"Yes?" said Angus, cheerily.

"I'll uh," they said. "I'll come back later."

And then they were gone.

  
Eventually, the group seemed to have categorized all they could. Now there were several things they wanted to try out.

Merle tried casting Heal, and by the reactions, it was not successful. Then he tried Turn Undead, which was profoundly uncomfortable and not something Kravitz wanted to be sprung on him, and then tried to use Heal again, to similar results.

Then Barry pulled out several new instruments and Kravitz fought the compulsion enough to tell them to let him go.

They moved on. Barry filled a metal syringe with _something_ , grumbled “Gods I wish these were disposable here,” and then leaned in again with the needle.

“Little poke,” he said.

Kravitz pulled away slightly.

“You sound like a dentist, sir,” Angus said, scolding.

Behind him, Merle shuddered theatrically. Barry threaded his hands back into Kravitz's ribcage, slid the plunger down into a piece of lung, and then flapped a hand at Merle, who passed over a scalpel with only mild grumbling.

Kravitz felt a little jolt of warmth as the blade slipped through his lung tissue, and then Barry cursed.

“Poof, there goes our sample,” grumbled Merle.

“That does make sense,” Lup said. “You essentially tried to cut away light, of course it’s not going to exist without contact with his main soul. Worth noting, though.”

“It filled back in,” Angus noted.

Kravitz felt shifted a few inches to the left, stopped feeling the cold table under him. Lup looked at his face and blanched.

“We’re done,” she said. “Babe, get outta there.”

“What?” said Barry. “Why?”

“Look at his eyes,” said Angus. “He’s stopped projecting anything but his sclera.”

“Blank eyed Krav is a no-go,” Lup said, firmly. “Don’t want him to go into shock or whatever souls do. _We’re done here_.”

Barry removed his hands reluctantly. He looked more closely at Kravitz and winced.

“Sorry, bud,” he said. “You can, uh, do whatever you want with this. The white eyes are sure something.” He gestured to the entirety of Kravitz’s body.

Kravitz shifted almost immediately to his soul form. It was easiest to maintain, a form of rest and healing. He shifted towards warmth, and Angus reached out his hands and cradled him to his chest.

Taako had slid off the table as soon as Kravitz shifted. He’d been unusually quiet as the procedure continued, and he rushed over. Angus, very cautiously, handed Kravitz over.

Lup, Barry, and Merle were talking quietly in a group, but sensory stimuli were blunted in this form.

Kravitz sunk deeper into his Self and made the best of his recuperation opportunity. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of results: Kravitz's organs have significant fibrosis. Angus records all this. Merle casts Heal as well as a Turn Undead and Heal combo and there is no effect. Removing tissue makes it vanish. Kravitz gets tired and his eyes blank out, prompting him to shift into soul-ball form.
> 
> Title is, again, from the same poem, stanza two.  
>  _The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -_  
>  And Breaths were gathering firm  
> For that last Onset - when the King  
> Be witnessed - in the Room - 
> 
> Next chapter: the completed research paper is published. It has... effects.


	3. What portions of me be Assignable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Necromancers as a whole are a fairly literate bunch, a fact which Kravitz is reminded of in what is perhaps the worst way possible. Barry contemplates an architectural addition to the Astral Plane. Angus gets a gift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away_  
>  What portion of me be  
> Assignable - and then it was  
> There interposed a Fly - 
> 
>  
> 
> A little bit of nasty corpse-related imagery in this chapter, apologies.

It surprised Kravitz a little, how hard it was to  _ do things _ . How much effort he had to put into  _ having hobbies _ .

It wasn't like he had less free time than before; he actually worked  _ less _ , now that he wasn't so alone. But he had spent so much time dormant before, waiting, a sleep that was not sleep. Sometimes he would go and sit in concert halls and let the music take him somewhere deeper, and then head back to work.

But now! Even at night, there were things to do. Sometimes he slept, because Taako liked it when he slept, and it  _ did _ feel good. Sometimes he read books; mostly ones Angus recommended. Sometimes he'd cast silence on the music room and play whatever he wanted to play, even if it was twenty etudes in a row. 

Often he would just drift, both figuratively and literally, around the house, before migrating back to his-and-Taako's material bedroom when the sun started to rise.

The music room was his favorite, though. He had  _ experiments  _ of his own.

The gnome necromancer had inspired him, musically speaking. He was messing with creating some bells, using some notes Barry had left him on the creation of the Animus Bell as well as generalized use and also cross-referencing a list of what he most wanted to be able to do with regards to wayward souls. It was hard going. Kravitz thought that maybe he should talk to an  _ actual _ bard who knew about modern techniques. He himself was quite out of date even when it came to most modern cleric and emissary activities, and he didn't know much about how things worked in the music scene right now.

He was in the middle of working on the smallest of his lineup, a soothing bell, one meant to bring back the final sleep, when Lup practically kicked the door down. 

Kravitz startled slightly, surprised by the sunrise and her sudden appearance, but registered her grin.

"AcCEPted, babe!" She waved a copy of The Paper wildly in the air, then shoved a letter in his hands, detailing a few changes that needed to be made before the paper could be published, in the next edition of  _ Practical Arcana _ . 

"It's been  _ ages _ since I got a paper published," Lup enthused. "I had a  _ hell _ of a résumé in Tusun, you know. Barold too. I gotta build it up here now."

She clapped her hands, twice, then clapped Kravitz on the shoulder.

"Thanks, boss man," she said.

“You didn’t mention that I’m your boss, right?” Kravitz said. “No… names or anything?”

"Nah, nah, you’re just ‘the subject.’ Gods, I'm so excited. Academia won't know what hit it. I gotta wake Barry up."

And then she was gone, turning so fast her long braid whacked Kravitz in the elbow. The gem in the tie on the end hit his ulnar nerve, and he dropped his bell before he thought to be astonished that he had a nerve to hit.

He definitely wasn’t about to bring that particular piece of information up at the dinner table, though. The “funny bone” jokes would haunt him for a century.

* * *

 

The thing about Kravitz's job was that, well, he had spent a millennium and a half embodying the definition of "doesn't get out much." He was a myth, a spectre. "The Grim Reaper will get you!" people would say, half joking, knowing only a vague idea of him. Only the most serious and learned necromancers really seemed to accept that he was real.

He also spent time as someone the acolytes at multiple temples to the Raven Queen warned each other about.  _ That strange quiet man who's been visiting this shrine for longer than anyone’s worked here. Sometimes he sings in the graveyard. It's best to leave him alone. _

But now? Well. His family was famous. It wasn't common knowledge, but some people knew Lup and Barry were "reapers," and so they knew reapers  _ existed _ . They didn't exactly spread it around, but they also didn't exactly hide it. And going out in public with any of them was an experience in itself. Taako was not what one could call  _ subtle _ . Kravitz had snuck them into the symphony several times specifically to avoid an hour of dealing with gushing strangers.

Taako  _ liked _ gushing strangers. He liked being the center of attention, "building his brand," at least if it was in moderation and he was in total control of the interactions. It made Kravitz uncomfortable. He'd see people look at him, at Taako's arm around his waist, and see jealousy, or awe, or excitement. None of these were emotions that he typically garnered day-to-day.

The worst bit was that people would stop and talk to Kravitz periodically, even when he was by himself. Taako brushed this off, half flippant and half masking any concerns he might have had.

"Of course they wanna talk to you," he'd say, whenever Kravitz mentioned being cornered in the snack aisle. "You're hot as fuck.”

Kravitz didn’t really know how to emphasize that for over a millennium the extent of his social life had been people he’d killed in various fun and exciting ways. You couldn’t exactly trick the next door neighbors into falling into their own bonfire and dying in a splendid conflagration just to get out of uncomfortable questions about what exactly your job was,  _ how did you meet Taako, again _ ? He wasn’t about to make a golem out of nearby rocks and smash someone’s head in when he just wanted some quiet time in a local park and was instead confronted with giggling teens. 

He did a lot of sneaking around by using his raven form for smaller trips. A large, leucistic corvid wasn’t particularly inconspicuous, but it also wasn’t associated with Taako From Teevee. 

He worried, a little bit, about what the paper would do to his anonymity. There it was, in precise magazine print, in a widely disseminated scholarly journal: information about his  _ unique _ situation vis-a-vis corporeality. Nothing personally identifiable, as Lup had assured him, but, well, people could make assumptions.

It was nice to know their conclusions, though. Their working theory was that, now that Kravitz was seeking out old memories and sensations that he’d forgotten, his construct was reflecting the memories of his past life in a physical way. Shifting forms seemed to be an appropriate reset when his joints got hot and stiff, and he had a few scraps of memory where illness was only a small factor which seemed to be effective stopgap measures. It wasn’t pleasant, necessarily, but it was nice to have that sort of reassurance.

Death, as it turned out, was quite an effective cure for illness, as long as you didn't remember that you were once alive.

As long as you had enough pieces of your life to cover up the sun-warmed cobbles, the haze of paresthesia traveling down your limbs, your heart beating like it wanted to sprout out of your chest, the way everything blurred before you closed your eyes for what you had the numb hazy thought would be the last time.

Kravitz explained all of this to the Raven Queen, and She watched him intently, a curled semicircle around the impression of his body in the mists. 

**DO YOU WISH FOR MEMORIES, KRAVITZ** ? She questioned.  **YOU HAVE ASKED BEFORE** .

"I don't know," Kravitz replied honestly.

**YOU DON'T KNOW.**

"I just have the few, right now," he said. "And they're not the most appealing." 

She reached for him, not with Her hands, but with Her  _ self _ , and there -- a memory of dipping his head under the water of a natural hot spring and then holding his wet hair still until the winter froze it stiff; lifting a rock and finding a centipede under it; the sunlight through the leaves. Nothing that could really form a complete picture of who he was, who he had been, but still, it was enough.

“Thank you,” he said, awed. “These are… nice to have.”

She smoothed his hair back, and though Her beaked face showed no emotion he felt certain that She was smiling.

* * *

Angus and his college friends went to a murder mystery moving picture show about a fortnight after the paper was published. Kravitz, who continued to nurse a lingering distrust of the entire industry, went along to supervise, although he was not allowed to invite Taako, who Angus specifically banned for “preferring talking during moving pictures over watching them.”

Kravitz sat in the back of the theater and stared unblinkingly at the bright screen, waiting for the trick. Angus begged a few bronze pieces off of him to get an overpriced snack from the vendor out front. It was supremely uneventful.

He got called out on a job about halfway through the show. He touched Angus’s mind, projected words into it, telling him that he needed to leave, and that he still didn’t like this entire situation involving watching people he was absolutely certain were dead, and that he’d see Angus whenever he got back to the house that weekend, don’t stay up too late.

Then he slipped out the back of the theater, ducked behind the nearest wall, and opened his book.

It was an easy job, low level, just two college kids. Maybe even classmates of Angus. He was supposed to be delivering them a warning, tell them that animating creepy dolls they found in thrift stores with little scraps of souls really wasn’t the hill they wanted to (literally) die on. No killing, this time, just a talk.

He sliced a rift easily into their self-consciously goth “lair.” They stared at him with wide eyes, hands paused in their work.

Kravitz took a step forward towards them, and then another step, and was brought up short. Golden flecks filled the air around him, like dust motes in the sunlight, and then -- he lost control of his construct. Some sort of abjuration magic, but infused with something else.

It  _ hurt _ . He cycled through forms: his default fleshbody, his Reaper skeleton, a large leucistic raven, a facsimile of his original body (which felt strange and uncomfortable, now that he was so unused to it), a shapeless beast of feathers and bone, a decomposing corpse, a young girl in a white dress, his pure soul form.

When he had a mouth to scream with, he screamed. When he had the mass to slam against the walls of his prison he hurled his body against the motes. 

All material items on his person dropped to the ground; nonconjured clothing, his stone of farspeech, a sapphire earring Lup had stolen off a bounty and given to him, his new deep blue hairstick.

The necromancers -- kids, really, barely out of adolescence -- stood and looked at him.

“Shit, I guess that  _ was _ worth a read,” one said. “A slog, but --”

“But a soul destabilizer worked,” the other replied. “We guessed and we were  _ right _ .”

“We should probably get out of here,” said the first. They gathered up books and chalk and components and ran.

The spell circle Kravitz had stepped in didn’t lose any power. Time went strange for him, as it often did when he was alone. 

His stone of farspeech, fallen on the floor, rang. He couldn’t tell if it had been thirty seconds or several hours. But he could hear Barry’s voice.

“Hey, uh, just wanted to, check in?” he said. “The Queen’s worried, and I… know she gets anxious. About you. Need help?”

Kravitz gained a mouth again and shrieked as loudly as possible.

“Oh,” said Barry. “I’ll, uh. I’ll take that as a yes?"

A rift opened across the room and Barry stepped though. Kravitz saw his eyes go wide, start scanning the sigils on the ground, saw his hand dart to his back pocket and pull out a piece of chalk.

"Shit," he said. "Stick tight, I'll get you out… Lup! LUP!" 

He heard her yell back; the rift had been opened from the new round room the Raven Queen created for "breaks and socializing", and it sounded like Lup was, perhaps, in her office. 

"What?" she said, voice distant and echoing.

"I need help!" Barry yelled. 

He approached Kravitz and the dust motes quickly and erased a few sigils with his hand. 

Kravitz's form stabilized and he slumped downwards just as Lup stepped through Barry's portal and looked around.

"Oh, what the  _ fuck _ ," she said and smashed a glowing jar on a nearby table with a vicious kick. 

"Leave the jars," said Barry. "Burn the books."

Kravitz realized, distantly, that he now resembled a corpse partially through the decomposition process. Around him, papers and tables went up in flames. Barry touched his palm to Kravitz's bare calf, gently, grounding.

Lup returned, picked Kravitz up as best she could, and cradled him. A beetle crawled out of his mouth and started towards her cheek; it disappeared when it lost contact with his skin, but she still flinched a little when its front feet touched her face.

Her fleshbody was burning, like a fever, burning like her lich form was bursting to escape. She was an inferno against his skin.

Barry's hand was clammy on Kravitz's cold leg, but he felt energy flowing from his palm back into his construct. He raised his head slightly to see that Barry had almost entirely erased the original circle and used the pieces of chalk nearby, as well as his own from home, to draw his own circle.

He seemed to be leeching energy from various glowing jars around the room, identical or similar to the one Lup had smashed. Kravitz could tell none of them were full souls, every one of them scrambled beyond all identity. The energy sustained him but also made him feel like he was crawling out of his skin. 

But it was stabilizing him. He no longer felt like he was melting into ooze, could banish the pile of spectral maggots under his sternum.

"Rough go of it, huh?" said Lup, when he lifted his head fully off her chest. Her voice was tight with what he recognised as fury. "Can you hold on a little longer? Taako's gonna want to see you, then you can go home."

Kravitz made a vague noise. He hoped it sounded appropriately assenting. 

He exerted the effort to shift into another form, any other form, and ended up in the guise of a child.

_ A girl in a cotton slip, barefoot _ . At least it was small, compact. Lup lifted him easily.

Barry cut a rift straight through to their living room and Lup set Kravitz gently on the couch, fussing slightly with the position of his head on the throw pillow.

Barry lowered himself to the floor and sat cross-legged, still carrying a jar, an arcane symbol floating over his hand. Kravitz didn’t want to ask.

Lup settled next to him and it glitched, flickered out, and then strengthened, her proximity making it stronger.

“Can I ask what all this is?” Barry asked, gesturing towards the whole of Kravitz's current form. “I wasn’t aware this was something you could look like.”

Kravitz rolled onto his side to look at him. It took considerable effort; he relied on the mental aspect of moving his construct much more than his muscles.

“It’s based off an old archetype,” he said, his voice high and thin, appropriately childlike for this form but unfamiliar. “Poem, I think. ‘ _ Wind chimes and the smell of lemons _ .’ You know.”

“I don’t, actually,” said Barry.

"You wanna recite that poem to us?" Lup asked. "Keep ya present." 

Kravitz did, so he did.

They looked at each other when he was done.

"Do you really have a 'staircase of hair and bone'?" Barry asked.

_ "I've _ never seen it," said Lup. "I don’t want to know about any of Krav's weird eavesdropping stairs. Creepo."

"Of course not," said Kravitz. " And I don’t eavesdrop.” He paused. “That would be disgusting."

"We could  _ build _ one," said Barry, half-joking.

"No," said Kravitz. "See the previous point about it being  _ disgusting _ ."

"Hey, he's not the one who brought it up," Lup said, as the door opened.

It was Taako, of course, back from his school, on a day he taught three classes. Fridays wore him out, always; his makeup was smeared just slightly, hair a little mussed.

The heels of Taako's shoes had lowered considerably since Wonderland; he was even wearing flats today. But even so Kravitz could tell he was very slightly favoring his right leg; a little drag of the foot, his knee not quite bending as far. Little things, quirks of body language a glamour couldn't quite cover up. Subtle, but Lup and Barry would notice it too.

Kravitz regretted making his day worse.

Taako spotted them and his ears flattened back towards his head.

"Barry? What's the jar?" he asked, taking a series of rapid steps forward. 

"Taako," Lup started. "It's okay." She was vibrating slightly with nervous energy and thus wasn’t all that convincing.

"Who's the kid?" Taako pressed.

"Hi, dove," said Kravitz. "It's just me."

Taako looked at him and huffed out a breath.

"I thought it might be." He settled on the side of the couch, ran his hand gently through Kravitz's child-self's thick curls. "You gonna skedaddle now, or what?"

"I -- yes. Don't make that face, it will be fine." 

"Feels like you been spending a lotta time in the Astral Plane, is all," Taako muttered. "I don't like you getting hurt, obvs, and then you just leave."

Kravitz thought about what he wanted to say for a little bit, and then let out a puff of air.

"I don't want to hurt you when I say this," he said, "Don't want to start a quarrel right now. But the Astral Plane is my home. It's where I belong. I can't … am literally, physically incapable… I can't give that up."  

"I don't understand," said Taako, bluntly. "But I don't wanna fight either." 

Lup put a hand on Taako's shoulder. "We feel it too, you know," she said. "Not near as strong. We're not the same type of dead Krav is. It's just like a … a really good night's sleep."

Taako jabbed a finger at her. "You're not hurt, are you? You'd tell me?"

Lup shook her head. "Just  _ real _ fuckin' pissed off, babe. Those fuckers had two copies of the latest edition of Practical Arcana." 

"They had, uh, definitely read the paper," Barry added. “Just, based on, you know, the spellcasting.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” said Kravitz. 

It was just, well.

The twins were terrifying when they were angry. It wasn't just the power of their combined magical skill; it was that they picked the precipitating incident over in detail, riling each other up, a vicious self-replicating cycle of fury. The concept of temperance was so foreign to Lup that Kravitz suspected she had only a theoretical understanding of the word's definition. Taako held every slight against him in fantasy mason jars in his chest; like some sort of horrible museum where he could view the exhibits of even the smallest snub.

Honestly, he had no intention of contributing to any of that. And he was  _ tired _ . 

"I had an idea, actually," Barry said. "I wasn't, uh, entirely present, all the time, there, really didn't want you, want Kravitz, to pick up that I was there, but -- in Lucas Miller's lab. You were in a mirror. Can you… still do that?”

“I mean, it needs to be sapphire, but, yes, I can… project an image of myself, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Tch, all the mirrors in the house’ll be sapphire once you give me five minutes and a cup of coffee,” said Taako, “That ain’t no big thing.”

“Good,” said Lup. “Now, bone boy, get your ass off my couch and off with mama.”

“It’s my couch too,” said Kravitz, a token protest, rolled off the couch into a rift, and left.

* * *

The Queen welcomed him back, as she always did, a comforting presence. He leaned his face into her wings for an interminable moment. He felt much more  _ together _ when he sat up, free from that itchy sense of the fractured souls Barry had shored him up with.

When he felt more solid he sought out the sapphire mirrors back at his house, locked on the room with two souls inside. When he dropped in the mirror he’d chosen had been relocated to the kitchen, giving him a perfect view of Taako perched on the counter eating raw cookie dough out of his favorite yellow ceramic mixing bowl, the oven lit and unused next to him. Taako was trying to explain to Ren that sometimes you stopped things halfway because that was when they were  _ done _ , and that was why he wasn't actually baking cookies and also why none of his gradebooks were updated. Ren, very clearly, was not buying it.

He made eye contact with Taako and waved, and as he faded out again he saw him  _ beam _ .

 

Kravitz decided to get some work done if he was going to be here for a while.

He finished up some repairs on the Stockade, peeked out through the mirror again and helped Barry cheat at cards, made a long list of logistical problems and then bullet-pointed solutions, reminded Angus to blink while he read, and then sat down to write up a summary of all his recent jobs.

Eventually he had filled two thick leather-bound notebooks with mission reports and decided that this would be his last task before returning.

He tucked them under his arm and took them to the wide Room of Records, its halls filled with wisps of ghosts and its shelves stacked with identical journals.

He stared at them; rows and rows, stretching on and on. He could not recall even a fraction of the memories contained in them, although he knew he had written them all during his tenure as Reaper. 

The Queen was not present, and then she was.

" **KRAVITZ** ," She said. " **YOU ARE TROUBLED** ."

"It's just strange," Kravitz said. "I know more about Lup and Barry than I do about myself. Being here just emphasises that, I supposed." 

The Raven Queen curled Herself around him, like a wind ruffling his center. " **LUP AND BARRY CAME TO ME PREMADE,"** She said.  **"I BUILT** **_YOU_ ** **FROM THE DUST WITH YOUR SOUL AS A SCAFFOLD, MADE YOU IN A WAY I DID NOT DO FOR THEM** ."

"I understand," said Kravitz. "I needed to change, to be  _ this _ . And I think many people would have been very angry with you, if you'd done anything with their memories."

" **ARE YOU ANGRY WITH ME, KRAVITZ** ?" Her voice shuddered and wailed around him. " **YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SAY NO** ."

"I think…" He stopped, reconsidered. "Memories form so much of a self. I think Taako is so upset with Lucretia because he didn't like who he was, without his."

" **AND DO YOU LIKE WHO YOU ARE** ?"

"Yes," said Kravitz. "Very much so."

" **GOOD** ," She said. " **GOOD. TAKE THESE. THEY ARE NOT FOR YOU."**

He held out a hand and watched as a palmful of loc beads materialised inside it.

"Not for me?"

" **NOT FOR YOU. TAKE THEM WITH YOU, WHEN YOU GO** ."

“Of course,” he said, and then She was gone.

He slipped the jewelry into his pocket, took a deep, unnecessary breath, and stepped out of the mists, into the foyer of his house. 

It must have been a weekend; Barry’s jeans jacket wasn’t on its hook, and Angus’s neat little patent leather shoes rested in the spot he’d claimed for them. 

Kravitz peeked around the door to the kitchen, knocked gently on the doorframe, and got nearly bowled over by 120 pounds of teenager hitting him in the sternum. 

Angus beamed up at him as Kravitz got his footing again.

“I missed you!” he said, cheerful. “It’s nice to see you in person again. Sorry for my soapy hands! I was cleaning up after making pretzels.”

“It’s good to be back,” said Kravitz. “You and Taako made pretzels, huh?”

“No, just me, sir, he says that if I want to eat him out of house and home then that’s a very noble goal and he entirely supports me but he also requires compensation, and that compensation is free labor. I think he’s just tired today. He was on the couch, last I saw!”

“I’ll help you with those dishes and then go find him,” Kravitz offered.

“Nuh-uh you won’t,” came Taako’s voice from the door. Kravitz turned as Taako approached, took his wrist and pulled him back towards the couch. Angus trailed after them as Taako tugged Kravitz close as he laid down. 

“Nincë-anqualmënya. C'mere." 

“Please don't call me that in front of Angus,” said Kravitz, but moved as he was directed to anyway. He sat on the floor and buried his face in Taako's soft stomach, closing his eyes. 

"What, you don't want me bein' romantic and nasty?"

"Not particularly," Kravitz said, muffled.

"It's alright," came Angus's voice. "I know about sex stuff."

"Who told you? Don’t they know you’re a baby?" demanded Taako. He paused, and then added, "Was it those college kids you spend time with?" 

"Somewhat," said Angus cheerfully. "But it was mostly you."

“Fine, fine. Sorry, or whatever. C'mere, pumpkin, you too. Got it out of my system.” 

Kravitz felt the couch dip slightly as Angus came and sat next to them. 

“I think I do know the people who did that to you,” said Angus, softly. “Abjuration department students; they’ve stopped coming to class and I think it’s because Miss Lup killed them. I guess I never really thought about who would be reading a paper like that, which was a grave oversight on my part.”

“Can we talk about it later?” Kravitz asked. “I’m done thinking about this, for now."

Taako scratched gently at his scalp, soothing, and Kravitz sighed into his warm skin. He smelled like camphor and menthol and cloves; more precisely, he smelled like he'd taken a bath in Merle’s strongest analgesic salve. It was, like most things about Taako, just this side of too much. 

Kravitz supposed he couldn't complain. He himself had been reliably informed that he smelled like wet dirt and decomposing leaves, although sometimes people tried to be polite and say  _ mulch _ . 

"That's fine, sir!" said Angus, audibly beaming. "I had a question for you, anyway. Will you do my hair like yours?" 

"I  _ knew _ you were getting shaggy," Taako exclaimed. “You coulda just told me that was why you didn’t wanna get your hair cut.”

"You want hair like mine?" Kravitz asked. He was more surprised than he expected. "I don't. I don't think I'm good at hair. Mine just  _ is _ like this."

"It does look very nice," said Angus, "You're the obvious choice." 

Kravitz turned his head to look at him. 

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery, you know," Taako laughed, semi-sardonic. 

“You could ask Lucretia,” Kravitz said. “She has actual physical hair, that she has to actually take care of.”

Angus shook his head. “No offense meant to Madam Director,” he said, “But her hair is about two centimeters long.”

Taako nodded sagely. “Lucy’s done ‘hair care’ once in her life and it was at that spa she went to with Merle.”

“Lucretia went to a spa with  _ Merle _ ?” Kravitz asked, astonished. The Director projected an image of someone much to busy to sleep, much less go to a spa.

“She felt bad that Magnus cut his arm off,” Taako shrugged. “Merle’s a sucker for her weirdo ‘I’m sorry’ guilt gifts, I don’t even know.”

“Why does everyone always blame  _ Magnus _ ?” Kravitz asked, somewhat offended. Impersonating a deity to trick someone into turning themself to stone had been one of his more creative ideas for killing his bounties. It had been  _ inspired _ . It had been  _ hilarious _ . Merle had blamed the completely wrong god for the incident for quite a while. 

He regretted that the target had been Merle, because now he felt slightly obligated to feel bad about it. 

“It’s ‘cause he cut off Merle’s arm! Who just  _ does that _ to someone?”

Angus made eye contact with Kravitz and mouthed, “ _ You will not win this. _ ”

“Anyway,” Taako continued, “I know you use that jojoba oil I bought you, don’t even try to deny it."

"I just…" 

"You're very vain, yes I know." Taako seemed entirely unconcerned with the irony of possibly the most appearance-conscious person in all of existence calling  _ someone else _ vain. "Suck it up, Krav, pamper the kid."

That reminded Kravitz of the beads jangling in his pocket.

“Oh, one minute, Angus, here,” he said, pulling them out. “The Raven Queen gave me these; said they weren’t for me. I’m assuming She meant that they should be yours?”

Angus’s eyes widened as he cupped his hands and Kravitz poured the jewelry into them. 

“Oh, please thank her for me, this is so wonderful, I know that I will not be able to use them for a little while but they are so beautiful, do they come from her temples? You said that the jewelry you wear often comes from sacrifices, but I don’t want to assume--”

“She’s buttering you up  _ young _ ,” Taako cut him off. “You can’t trust gifts from goddesses, little man-- sometimes they explode.”

“Yes,” said Angus, beaming, holding up a bead and looking at them both through the center. “ _ And  _ help you save the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm a very slow writer," I say, having been sitting on all but about three paragraphs of this for the past week. I was busy reviewing appropriate techniques for working with biohazards, which should also be on Barry's agenda. There was a lovely thread on Tumblr about public perceptions of Kravitz that I wanted to incorporate, but if I had this would be published probably two full weeks later.
> 
> Poetry corner: Kravitz recites "Death comes to me again, a girl" by Dorraine Loux. "'I sit beneath the staircase made of hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it,' she says, shaking the dust from her hair, 'especially when they fight, and when they sing.'"
> 
> W/r/t a totally different meaning of "death coming," "nince-anqualmenya" is essentially the Quenya version of "mon petit mort."


	4. Between the light - and me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the summer solstice, and also maybe time to come up with a few contingency plans when it comes to forcible soul disruption.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -_  
>  Between the light - and me -  
> And then the Windows failed - and then  
> I could not see to see -

“We need to have a talk,” said Lup, when she and Barry got home. They had been on a “date”, which Kravitz strongly suspected meant that they’d gone to the quarry just outside of town to a) kiss and b) blow things up.

“Ugh,” said Taako. “Hard conversations? No thanks.”

“Think of it as… a planning session,” Kravitz said. “I’m not up for more of … the same, _vis a vis_ forcible shapeshifting.”

Lup grimaced. “Me either. You _oozed_ on me. I’ve had a lotta people die on me, but putrefaction glop? Not a fan.”

Kravitz shifted his face into corpse mode and blew a raspberry at her. She blew one back. He refocused. “I did have a, hmm, question — Angus seems to assume you killed those kids.”

Lup shrugged, movement trying for casual but coming out threatening. “Yeah, I did.”

“I was sent to give them a warning,” Kravitz said. “We can’t just kill people who we don’t like. There’s a trial and a sentencing. You know, _rules_. You have the book.”

“Mags n’ Merle an’ I do it all the time,” Taako mumbled.

“I wish you wouldn’t, sir,” Angus said.

“I think, the, uh, the _crux_ of the matter, is that the whole thing was, kind of, our fault,” Barry cut in. “Like I think that that is possibly the issue here.”

“Oh trust me, babe, I am _fully_ aware,” Lup said.”Like definitely one hundo percent aware.” Her hands, laid flat on the beautiful cherry wood table, started to smoke. Barry pulled them into his own and she left behind the charred marks of her palms and fingers.

“You can’t retract the article or some shit?” Taako asked. “Make an announcement that people shouldn’t read it?”

Angus shook his head. “It’s already been in print for too long. We’d have to track down all the copies, which would only make it much more interesting.”

Lup tapped a finger on her lips, pensive. “I do like the way you think, though, Ko. We could put out a press release. ‘Please be nice to Kravitz, he’s a narc but he’s nice about it,’ yknow?”

Taako shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Same problem. Some necromancers prob’ly wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise. You’d give them ideas and shit. They’re not gonna stop if you ask nicely.”

“ _I’d_ stop if someone asked nicely,” Barry said.

“Did you, babe?” asked Lup. “ _Did_ you?”

“It’s -- it’s just,” Barry started. “It’s a fine line! A fine line between necromancy and healing, you know that, I’m not -- I never _raised_ anyone. At least not recently.”

“I really appreciate you not explicitly disobeying your employer,” Kravitz said. “Really. _Super_ grateful for that basic work tenet being followed. Thank you for following the bare minimum.”

Lup cackled. “I’ve disobeyed Cap’nport so many times,” she said. “Obedience is not the brand.”

“It really, really should be,” Kravitz said. “These are basic tenets of life and death!”

“Sounds like something a narc would say,” said Lup.

“It’s not a narc thing to have principles,” said Taako, “He’s just lawful, is all, lawful and petty. It’s only a narc thing if you’re a fucking _tattletale_ , which he _isn’t_ , and—”

“I just think—” Kravitz started, but his voice was lost in the clamor of Lup yelling that he was a narc, and Taako yelling back that she couldn’t say that without admitting that she too was one. The twins had been spoiling for a row for a week, it seemed like, eager for an excuse to blow off steam.

“I just think!” Kravitz tried again. The twins had devolved into yelling about Lup being a “normie,” which was apparently Taako’s word for someone who took the last name “Bluejeans” instead of remaining mononymous. Barry, equally loudly, was attempting to defend his wife’s (and, by extension, his) surname and was being soundly ignored.

Kravitz drew on all his training in projecting his voice, pulled as much air into his lungs as he could, and bellowed, “WILL EVERYONE PLEASE BE QUIET?”

They all looked at him with varying levels of shock.

“Damn,” said Lup.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, bud!” said Barry, clapping his shoulder.

“That was very impressive, sir! I’m proud of you!” said Angus, apparently uncaring that Kravitz was over 100 times his age.

Kravitz thanked him, and then added, “I think it’s too late to expect anyone to not pay attention to it. Those kids were very clear that they’d studied the paper. What the next step is is probably, hmm, shoring up the ol’ defenses, I guess? Really making it hard, to do that again.”

“If you have any ideas on how to do that, reaper boy, I’m all ears,” said Lup. “For now I think you’re just gonna have to have a babysitter.”

“I’ve gone centuries without a fleshbody,” Kravitz said, offended.

“Yeah,” said Lup, “And we know you’re a Real Boy even when you don’t wear your skin. I just dunno about the general public anymore.”

* * *

 They were all of them a tad cautious around Kravitz. He could tell Lup at least was feeling guilty; she commandeered the record player and put on bouncy, rhythmic music as soon as they had all settled.

Kravitz did little hand dances to the music, mostly to make her relax, but partially because he really did enjoy hand dances. Angus joined him, briefly, and having someone else to dance with made Kravitz throw his whole body into the music-listening, which was great fun, as always.

He liked dancing, liked hurling his physical form bodily into whatever motions he felt matched the music. He liked the raw sensations it brought with it, even when it was just him swaying back and forth in time with the beat.

He talked to his ravens, stepped out a few times to take on small but important jobs; soothing the souls of a family, dead in a house fire, shepherding the lost soul of a small child wandering in the woods, unaware their body lay under a willow tree, victim to heat stroke. A psychopomp rather than a reaper, at least for now.

A “real boy,” Lup had called him. He wasn’t a _real boy_ all the time, was the problem. It took work, effort. Sometimes he forgot how physics worked when people had actual mass, moved like he was lighter or heavier than he should, or like he had the wrong number of bones. It was frequently easier to not breathe, especially recently. He liked possessing houses or coffee shops and letting the noisy hum of life thrum through him, like he was leeching off vitality. Sometimes he hopped places instead of walking because it was more fun that way (although he thought he might have done that when he was alive, too.)

Kravitz ended up spending a lot of time with his instruments that weekend. The bells were coming along quite nicely; he’d determined what he wanted each of them to do, begged a few books full of artificer notes off of Lucretia, and sung to them as he worked.

There was only one thing he had trouble with; as he had plenty of ways of dealing with living necromancers (most of which involved their death), his bells focused on controlling, soothing, or otherwise manipulating the undead. This was a category that he, unfortunately, was a part of, as he was reminded several times after putting himself to sleep or causing strange, full-body judders as his construct tried to obey the compulsion to _move_ but had no direction. At least he was certain that they could stop a thrall or lesser construct in their tracks; Kravitz was an incredibly powerful undead being, having been formed from the hands and mind of a goddess instead of being pulled from the earth by a mortal necromancer.

Mostly he got around this by going skeletal and dialing the sensitivity on his artificial hearing way, way downwards. Lup and Barry, in their fleshbodies, were not affected, so he didn’t feel too bad about leaving the door open partway so someone could theoretically hear him if something went _really_ wrong.

He picked up one of the bigger bells, one meant to trap a spirit in whatever home it had found until it was released by a Reaper, and the bell tolled softly, and Kravitz—

Well. He felt very _solid_ , all of a sudden. Like his feet were firmly planted on the ground. Like physics was more than just something abstract. He could float still, yes (he tried it, levitated a few inches off the ground), but he didn’t feel like he had to guess how much he weighed and adjust his motions based on that.

He rang it a couple more times, flexed his fingers, and then took it downstairs.

Taako was stuffing peppers in the kitchen and wriggled his fingers at Kravitz when he poked his head in.

“What’s up, sweetcheeks?” he said.

Kravitz tolled the bell very slightly in answer, thinking, and then added, “I need… easy access to this, or something like it, in all my forms. Do you know some way I could attach it to me?”

“You mean _hang it on a belt_ style, or you mean _instant summons_?”

“The latter,” Kravitz said. “Although… a belt or cord is a good idea.”

“You could soulbind it,” Taako said, considering. He tapped the handle of his long wooden spoon on the counter. “I know Ango’s been looking into that because he’s jealous of Jess the Beheader.”

“The _beheader_? Like, killing people?”

“Fantasy wrestler. She’s kinda touchy about getting accused of murder, actually.” He slid all the peppers into a pan and then bent to put it in the oven. “Gimme like, five secs to wash my hands, and we’ll go snoop through his stuff.”

When his hands were dry he led Kravitz towards the bookshelves and hummed to himself as he scanned the spines. He pulled several out, flipped through them to find the indexes, and then, with a wink and a finger to his lips, dog eared a few pages in various ones.

“There ya go,” he said. “You’ll probably need help with the actual spell, but read up and come get me with any questions, yeah?”

“You found that fast,” Kravitz commented, impressed.

Taako tossed his braid. “Ch’yeah, it’s called knowing how an index works, I’m very smart.”

He was being sarcastic, but Kravitz kissed the top of his head anyway. “Thank you, love,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Taako. “Go read your book. I convinced Merle to let me cater the Solstice dinner and I gotta plan the menu, I’m busy, shoo!”

Kravitz shooed.

He read through all the books and began to evaluate his original plans. If he made the same bell, but much smaller, he could loop it through something in his default form, and have it easily accessible everywhere else.

It was a good plan. He just had to carry it out.

* * *

 “I’m going out on assignment,” Kravitz announced three days after he’d returned to the Prime Material Plane, still sparking with the sensory newness of the world.

But now he had a plan, and an assignment, finally, and he was going to do his job again, damn it.

“We’re coming too,” Lup said

“Listen, it’s going to be fine,” Kravitz said. “The three of us are the most powerful undead beings in Faerun, if I do say so myself.” He paused. “Ugh, that makes it sound like I’m bragging instead of stating facts.”

Lup shrugged. “We _are_ pretty bomber.”

“Well, b—by any reasonable metric, also the most, the most powerful undead beings in Faerun,” Barry added. He pulled his scythe from the air, twirled it gently. “Where we goin’?”

“Someone’s been out robbing graveyards, and it’s something like his fiftieth offense,” said Kravitz. “He’s got a weird little cabin out in the woods, and the watcher-ravens just finished tracking him there.”

“Which graveyard?” asked Barry, a bit too eagerly.

Kravitz squinted at him. “Classified,” he said “Let’s go.”

He opened a rift straight to the man's (weird, creepy) porch.

Kravitz wanted to sneak in through the tin chimney, so he did. Neither Lup nor Barry could fit, so they both waited outside the thick wooden door.

"I'm gonna bust this thing off its hinges the minute you finish reading the charges against him," Lup told Kravitz, leveling her wand towards them, and he believed her. Barry examined the carvings on the thick logs that made up the cabin with interest.

Kravitz turned spherical, hummed his way along the metal walls. It was "In the Hall of the Mountain King," appropriately dramatic and threatening. It echoed in the small space.

"Who's there?" yelled the necromancer, alarmed. Peering through the grate let Kravitz see that he was standing over a skeleton, possibly working on raising a thrall. He held a ceremonial athame threateningly and turned so that his back was against a large ornate bookshelf.

Kravitz set up a little spell to keep playing his humming and then spoke through the grate.

"Yarrow Tyelpe, you have been accused of ten counts of major necromany, several dozen counts of minor necromany, and attempted counterfeiting via the creation of _nabrók_ , illegal for its use of human skin. Do you have anything to say to counter these charges?"

"I -- who are you? How do you know --?"

That was as good as a confession.

"By the power vested in me, I sentence you to six centuries in the Eternal Stockade. You may petition the Raven Queen for clemency if you so desire. It is rarely granted but will not affect your punishment otherwise."

"Come out and face me!" the necromancer demanded.

"I would prefer not to," Kravitz said, levitated the bookshelf, and then dropped the entire thing on his head just as Lup blasted through the entryway.

"Gross," she said, looking at the hand sticking out from beneath the wood and books. “Why do you take so much joy in making nasty corpses, boss?”

Barry walked over to one of the skeleton and inspected it. There was a stone shoved in its mouth, large enough to dislocate the jaw. He tapped it curiously.

“This is strange,” he said. “Hey, Krav, you seen this before?”

Kravitz nodded. “Yes, I know what it is. It's still odd, though -- an old superstition says that placing stones in someone's mouth prevents them from rising, but people stopped using that technique about a thousand years ago. Why would a necromancer deliberately prevent someone from being resurrected? It doesn't make sense.”

Barry looked fascinated. “They used to bury people with rocks in Faerun? Were there many necromancers?”

“Less about necromancy than you might think,” Kravitz told him. “To keep them from rising again on their own, from spreading disease or sating their hunger. Old superstition about vampires, you know. It doesn't make a lot of sense. They did it often to people who looked… touched by death, by the Raven Queen, who you would think would be least likely to become undead.”

“I'm gonna ask you a rude question,” Lup declared.

“Yes. I’m fairly certain I did have a stone if that's what you want to know,” Kravitz replied. “Arguably my existence proves its inefficacy, but I was very clearly Touched.” He waved his hands vaguely around his face, explanatory, but also people had worried his persistent illness had been possibly communicable via a bite.

Lup laughed. “Words right outta my mouth, dude.”

“Did it hurt?” Barry asked.

Kravitz cocked his head at him. “Did what hurt?”

“The rock,” he said like it was obvious. “Seems painful.”

“You're asking if I could feel what people were doing to my _corpse_?” Kravitz asked. “I didn't feel anything! I was dead!”

“I just figured…” Barry started.

“Barry,” said Kravitz, “ _You’ve_ died. Did you feel anything happening to your dead body?”

“Well, I figured it might be different, is all… I never became undead right away when I was still in my body. And the other times were just a destroyed, uh, phylactery. Did you become undead right away? I guess I, hmm, assumed…”

“Not right away,” said Kravitz. “I died in Her temple, though, and that sped the process some. Undead speedrun. Also contributed to the rock.” He tilted his head, thinking. “I pity whoever found me,” he said, finally. “But I was gone, by then. Something new.”

“Could this dead dude be... you?”

“No, I died several thousand miles from here, but…”

“They’re digging up skeletons from your general time period,” Barry said. “I’m fairly certain of it. I don’t have the proper equipment here to do a radiometric dating spell on these other skeletons, but I’d guess they’d be within the same general time period of your death.”

“Now aren’t you glad we came along?” Lup asked, arch.

“Well I killed him _pretty easily_ ,” replied Kravitz, knowing that he sounded petulant but unable to stop himself.

“Mmmmhmmm,” Lup hummed, moving behind them. She sounded profoundly unconvinced.

“I have a plan,” Kravitz said. “I’m _working_ on it. Leave me alone.”

“I’ve got my eyes on you,” she called.

“Are you holding a jar of eyes?” Kravitz sighed. “Do you have a jar of eyes, in your hands, right now as you are speaking to me?”

“A big ‘un!” said Barry.

* * *

 Kravitz was really quite pleased that Angus wanted him to do his hair. Imitation, flattery, etc, etc. The main problem was that he really hadn’t been lying when he said he didn’t know how to give someone locs. When he was still alive, he had bound his curls back with a series of ribbons, letting it fall long, thick, and heavy down his back -- even in life, he’d had a lot of hair.

He asked the Raven Queen about whether or not he had any memories that might help, and she gave him _child Kravitz wriggling as his mother pulls his hair back into two milkmaid braids, so tight his eyes water, and also — there, there it is, his older brother’s hair,_ one big blur of sensations and thoughts and feelings, and he thanked her. It was a good start, at least. He felt much more confident.

He also didn’t know whether or not he was surprised that he’d had a elder brother -- maybe siblings, plural? It slotted neatly into his perception of his past self, but felt like it should maybe be something meaningful. As it was, though, there were millions of dead people in existence who had once been elder brothers, and Kravitz wasn’t sure whether or not he mourned this particular one any more than the others.

Angus was the lab instructor for two separate undergraduate summer classes. He sat on the floor by the couch, working on grading the worksheets spread out on a lap desk in front of him, and stayed quiet even when Kravitz accidentally pulled too hard.

Taako had a basket of whole apples to his left, a knife in his hand, and a bowl of cut and peeled apples to his right. He would slice the peel off in a long curve and hand it off to Angus to eat, although periodically he would use one to give himself a mustache.

“Look at me, I’m a human person,” he’d say, in a voice possibly meant to be an (extremely uncharitable) imitation of Lucas Miller. Then he’d give it to Angus, who would eat it.

Personally, Kravitz thought that this was a little disgusting (who knew where the underside of Taako’s nose had been?) but also had to admit that he was probably being a tad hypocritical here. Merle had eventually successfully explained “germs” to him. Kravitz was probably _covered_ by Taako germs.

“You sure this isn’t gonna make you sick?” Taako asked once the pile of peeled apples was bigger than the pile of whole ones. “That’s a lot of peel, pumpkin.”

“Nope!” said Angus, cheerfully. “I’m still hungry.”

“Shush, Taaks, he’s trying to get yolked,” said Lup, ruffling the half of Angus’s head that sported the starting phase of his new hairstyle.

“I _am_ yolked,” said Angus, proudly, although he really wasn’t. “Magnus picked me up a few days ago and said ‘oof.’”

“When’d you see Magnus?” asked Lup.

“Oh, the BOB called me in to consult on a crime spree they’re trying to assist with. Magnus was visiting because he’s slowly replacing all the furniture on the entire moon and also he and Ms. Carey are planning something. It was lots of fun. And Madam Director gave me a bottle of luminol, which is very exciting!”

Taako rolled his eyes. “Oh, _luminol,_ huh, she gave you luminol? She _bribed_ you with luminol? You, a good and honest detective boy, taking bribes?”

“It _is_ my favorite chemical, sir, and honestly I was running a little low and didn’t know if I had enough for the job that needed doing.”

“You have a favorite chemical?” Taako cackled.

“And you don’t, sir?”

“I have a _least_ favorite chemical,” Taako sniffed. “That’s different. Fuck phenolase, honestly, who looks at an apple and thinks ‘great, but make it brown and gross?’ No one. The worst enzyme in the world.” He brandished both the apple and knife he was holding. “'Catalyzes enzymatic browning.’ Fucker. 'Oh I’m polyphenol oxidase and I like being the direct cause of a bunch of food waste.’ What's its _damage._ ”

“That’s fair, sir,” said Angus. “But I’m sure there’s one you like.”

Taako thought about this briefly and then launched some elaborate story about one of his recent adventures with Magnus and Merle, where he had heroically saved them all from a horrible demise via suffocation, which he achieved by transmuting his socks into oxygen. It was all very dramatic. Kravitz followed approximately none of the chain of logic.

Angus, apparently, did, and took issue. “Why didn’t you just try to escape?”

“Sue me, so I wanted a little bit of a sitdown. Also, oxygen is an extremely reactive element and can cause combustion with most any flame given a little bit of heat, and you _know_ cha’boy was planning on lighting the place up as soon as we left, it was the best choice, and sure, maybe my toes were a little cold —”

“Do you ever think about reducing property damage?” Angus replied. “Maybe you wouldn’t have needed to lose your socks if you’d transmuted a bit of the wall to hydrochloric acid and then…”

“Ohh, you badmouthing me, kid? You think you could do better?”

Angus shrugged. “I’m just saying that…”

“No, no,” said Taako. “No, no. Square up, little man. You insult my methods, you insult my honor.”

He dropped his paring knife, snatched his Casual Everyday Wand from the side table, and leveled it at Angus. Kravitz removed his hands from Angus’s hair and scooted away from the danger zone.

“Sir,” said Angus, sounding infinitely tired, “We don’t have to duel every time…”

“Square the fuck up!” Taako hissed.

Angus rolled his eyes and then, quick as a flash, had whipped out a mage hand, snatched Taako’s wand, and was reaching out a real hand to catch it as it flew towards him.

He turned on his heel and sprinted out of the house.

Taako screamed in incoherent rage (possibly shock, too, it was hard to tell) and charged out after him. They all watched him go in silence. The door slammed shut behind them.

Lup picked up Taako’s abandoned knife and apples and started peeling them herself. She wasn’t quite as good as Taako, not quite as skilled at removing the peel in one go. Barry stole a few chunks from the peeled bowl. Kravitz, after a bit of thought, started to do the dishes.

"Five minutes until he calls one of us to pick him up," said Lup. "Five gold on it."

Kravitz shook his head. "Five gold on… ten minutes," he said. "He's really mad about Angus cheating."

"Fifteen," said Barry.

"Fifteen?" chorused Lup and Kravitz in incredulous unison.

"Seven to chase Angus," said Barry. "Five to sit and be angry. Three to start to walk back before he gives up."

"Specific and detailed," said Lup. "I like it. You gonna put your money on it?"

“Pay up, Barold,” said Kravitz. “Put your mouth where your dollars are.”

“Fine,” said Barry. “Five gold. A- and I’m not going to pay up, because I won’t lose.”

“Not to, to change the subject, but while they’re gone,” Kravitz said, “I have an, uh, request for you.”

“While they’re gone?” asked Lup.

“Taako won’t like it,” explained Kravitz. He wiped his soapy hands on a dishtowel.

“Ah,” said Lup.

“I have what I think is a pretty solid, uh, plan, for the whole” — here he gestured to his construct, trying to encompass all that being the physical manifestation of a soul entailed — “situation, and I would prefer to, shall we say, test it, in a non-lethal scenario.”

“You want Barry to zap you,” Lup summarized.

“I can do that,” said Barry.

“That’s… reassuring,” said Kravitz. “I do remember a lot of the circle itself, but maybe you could… recreate it? Or do something similar?”

“Yeah, I remember a lot of it too,” said Barry. “Gimme a few days and—”

They were interrupted by Lup's stone of farspeech crackling to life.

"I am disowning Agnes," came Taako's voice, lightly distorted with magic and stone-static. "He's a fuckin' cheat. He doesn't deserve any apple fritters." He was slightly out of breath.

"Okay, babe," said Lup. "You wanna be picked up?"

"No!"

Lup and Kravitz exchanged looks. Barry dabbed, very slowly.

Kravitz couldn't distinguish if he was being ironic or if he really thought that was how one did it. It was hard to tell with Barry sometimes.

"You sure?" Lup pressed.

"AbsoLUTEly," said Taako. The stone shut off.

"Twist of the century," Lup commented into the silence.

"Sweet lady," said Kravitz. "I think Barold's just won this thing."

"I get ten GPs now, right?"

“Only if he calls back,” Kravitz said.

Lup nodded.

“You were saying?” Kravitz prompted.

“Oh, I forget what I was saying,” Barry shrugged. “I was thinking that I could maybe, improve, the design some? They really weren’t all that elegant in their casting. I could make a better one.”

“We know, babe,” said Lup. “I think if Krav can escape one of your spell circles he could escape any.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Kravitz. “I guess it’s a plan then.”

“We gotta wait a week or so,” said Lup. “After the solstice, capisce?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Kravitz.”You need any help with those apples?”

“Sure, can you grab some lemon juice? Keeps ‘em from browning.”

Kravitz pulled the correct bottle out of the cabinet Lup had spelled to stay cool and handed it to her, watched her pour it over the skinned apple chunks. Barry snuck one.

Lup’s stone rang again. It was, as expected, Taako.

“I changed my mind. Maybe I _do_ want a lift home.”

* * *

 The Seven Birds, Extended Family Version, knew how to throw a party. Or perhaps that was just Merle. In any event, preparations were in full swing when Kravitz and the others stepped through a rift. They’d opened it straight into the Merlegaritaville kitchen, so Taako could ferry anything he needed from his kitchen to this kitchen (or chivvy Angus into doing it for him.)

Merle had a large field with tables set up for close friends and family, and there was a festival with many tents and activities in the town nearby. It was cheerfully noisy chaos.

Kravitz attempted to lurk on the sidelines, but unfortunately, people wanted to talk to him.

He had to do things like “small talk” with some people, which made being accosted by someone as straightforward as Magnus a welcome reprieve. Magnus also hugged him so hard that Kravitz felt his ribs creak and hefted Angus into the air (without difficulty, but definitely using more technique than he’d had to in the past.

He talked about his dogs at length, then clapped Kravitz on the shoulder before pausing.

“Wow, you’re lukewarm today. I'm glad you're not so different anymore,” he told Kravitz. “It was confusing.”

“Different?”

Magnus floundered a little. “Like, your facial expressions don’t match your skin touch?”

“My facial expressions don't match my skin touch,” Kravitz repeated flatly.

Magnus groaned.

“I think what Mr. Magnus means to say,” said Angus, apparently taking pity on them, “Is that you have a very warm smile, but touching you is often, hmmm…”

“Like touching a dead fish!” said Magnus, cheerfully.

“I don't know how. How to take that,” said Kravitz honestly.

Angus cocked his head a little to the side, which he had started doing lately, copying Kravitz's body language or, possibly, copying Lup's copy of Kravitz's body language, and then nodded in agreement. “I think it's a compliment, sir,” he said. “You do have a very nice smile.”

“Thank you,” Kravitz said.

“Oh, there’s Carey!” said Magnus. “I gotta run. Good to see ya, Krav.”

“I’m going to find Mavis and then go see if there are any more pretzels,” Angus said, tugging Kravitz’s sleeve.

“Didn’t you just eat two?”

“Yes!”

Kravitz talked to several more people, but the party rapidly got slightly overwhelming, so he wandered off, casually stealing a nearby bird feeder as he headed for the treeline.

He nearly quite literally ran into Killian on his way out. She was carrying a fantasy fire extinguisher in one hand and a plate of chocolate covered strawberries in the other, although when she tried to dodge him a strawberry toppled off the little tower she'd built.

He caught it in his free hand before it could hit the ground and proffered it to her.

"Keep it," she said, "I think I took too many of these, anyway. You want any more?"

"Oh," said Kravitz. "Sure. Are you, uh, are you expecting a fire?"

Killian made a vague gesture across the lawn. Kravitz followed her gaze to the weeping willow tree, where Carey and Magnus were huddled and whispering next to a pile of what looked like junk.

“Is that--” he started, “Should we be worried?”

“I… trust… my wife,” Killian said, slowly and deliberately.

“All right,” said Kravitz. He waited.

“I just hope it's nothing illegal this time,” she added eventually. "It's nearly always something illegal. I can't believe her best friend is also a rogue."

"Didn't she. Didn't she teach him?"

Killian nodded, dragged a hand down her face. Over by the tree, Magnus threw his arms in the air, gesturing big and loud, while Carey laughed and shook the shiny purple cylinder in her hand. She grabbed something that might have been a fantasy PVC pipe, and Magnus hefted a sack of -- ah.

"I think they're making a potato cannon. I also think they're using Taako's hair spray as the detonant."

"Ah damn," said Killian. "Any guesses on what they're planning to shoot?"

"Several, and none of them good," Kravitz said. "I'm gonna just... go now."

"You do that. Strawberry for the road?"

Kravitz accepted.

He looked over his shoulder once during his tactical retreat and saw her hefting the extinguisher and heading off across the quad. And then he sat, and set out a few shiny baubles he kept in his pockets, and spread out a little bit of birdseed, and waited.

The boom of the cannon almost rattled Kravitz out of his skin, but he was far enough away to have avoided the worst of the noise and pulled his bones back inside himself. The magpie watching him warily from the treeline also startled but did not fly away.

Kravitz settled a little further into himself, smoothed his hair back a few times, and smiled as the magpie fluttered to a stop in front of him.

He’d acquired quite a collection of avian friends by the time Taako found him. He was in high dudgeon, bristling.

“Magnus has no conception of restraint,” he announced. “He and Carey stole my hair spray! That shit was expensive, you know.”

“I know,” said Kravitz. “But you are very rich; you can buy more.”

“That’s not the _point_ ,” Taako said. “The point is, you don’t _waste_ shit. Even if I wasn’t gonna use it for hairspray I got like fifty goddamn scholarship funds I’m paying for. I gotta feed Ango and he could eat the contents of a whole farm. You don’t waste shit!”

“I know, dove,” Kravitz said. “What did they end up shooting?”

“Wasp's nest,” Taako said. “Blasted a big ol’ hole in it. It was nasty.”

He flopped to the ground and gestured vaguely at the birds slowly acclimating to his approach.

"I thought ravens were your Thing, whatcha doin' with magpies?"

"Corvids as a whole are my thing," said Kravitz, "Although, clearly, I have favorites. But magpies are so spritely. And they're still portents, sometimes."

"Portents, huh," said Taako. He stretched out his hand, and the magpies regarded it with suspicion.

"One for sorrow, two for mirth, you know."

Taako cocked an eyebrow. "'Mirth' doesn't rhyme with 'boy'," he said. "It's gotta be joy, then ‘three for a girl, four for a boy.’"

"No, it's ‘three for a death and four for a birth,’" Kravitz said.

Taako glared at him. "Sorrow, joy, girl, boy!"

Kravitz gave in. "Planar cultural differences, let's leave it at that. Unless you _want_ to quarrel over a poem."

"Poh-ehm," said Taako, laughing at him. "Let's argue about you giving the word poem like five extra goddamn syllables." He pronounced the word short and choppy, pohm.

“You say it like you choked on a pomegranate seed halfway through saying the name of the fruit,” Kravitz said.

“Well, _you_ say it like you forgot the final consonant and are drawing the word out to give yourself time to think!”

Kravitz stuck his tongue out at him, then tossed a sparkly piece of glass that had been left by some pious traveler at a small hidden shrine about twenty years ago. It landed in Taako's lap, and a magpie nearby perked up, hopping closer. Taako's eyes widened.

"Shimmery boy," he said, reaching out. "Look at those green hues! Bet I’d look great in a magpie dress, huh?"

Kravitz watched him coo over the bird. He wasn’t dressed up, per se, but he was as always intensely aware of the image he projected even as he wore whatever the hell he wanted. He and Lup were both wearing the same soft, casual leggings and tunic combo in different colors; it was somehow both exactly the right thing to wear to an extended family gathering and also very clearly Taako. He and Lup would link arms and then look like they had stepped out of a painting.

Kravitz could tell Taako and Lup apart instantly and effortlessly. They had different personalities, different body language, different speech patterns. Different souls.

But they were also both consummate performers, both always aware in some way that they were being observed. He wasn't quite sure either of them was comfortable with that. Even alone, their literally alien beauty turned heads; together they seemed to revel in inviting passersby to play "compare/contrast."

So many of their visible differences seemed deliberately calculated to highlight their identical aspects. It was probably habit by now, something they did by default, perhaps started when they were young in that way people try to distinguish identical twins. Lup, in warm tones, gold hoops in her ears and a soft orange dress, a sun charm dangling from her necklace. Taako, all cool colors, with silver jewelry and a purple tunic, moons embroidered on his hat. Lup, her hair braided over her left shoulder, the same side as her blue eye; Taako with his braid laying over his right, opposite to his brown eye. Lup, _three for a girl_ , Taako, _four for a boy_ , with their mirror image faces and bodies shifted into distinct directions by different dominant hormones.

 _Situs inversus _,__ their heterochromia flipped, Taako’s heart in the wrong side of his chest. Taako, alone, was a reflection without a mirror. A fearful symmetry, broken.

Taako liked the reliability of Kravitz’s vitiligo. For every pale patch on the right side of his body, an identical one grew on his left. The magpie, on the other hand, liked the shiny embroidery on Taako's hat.

They wandered back to the main party eventually; Taako had made a lemon lavender cake specifically because Kravitz liked it.

 The Midsummer Solstice proceeded in a blur of colors and smells and people talking. Kravitz knew he was warmer than usual, fueled by the friendly faces around him. He did several more Live Person things over the course of the festival, some more pleasant than others.

On the one hand, Angus taking a nap on his shoulder made Kravitz, usually able to get tired but not sleepy, close his eyes and fall asleep, which was nice, even if he did wake up feeling like someone had stuffed his mouth and eye sockets with cotton.

On the other, he got slightly tipsy, forgot to pay attention to his surroundings, and got swept away in the crowd, unable to think straight enough to find his family. By the time Lup located him he had a pounding stress headache from all the noise and chaos.

He had enjoyed himself, certainly, but was also very glad to be leaving.

They’d unpacked with varying levels of efficiency; Kravitz had been conscripted into laundry duty, and he’d also been trapped for some time under four living people who wanted a hug-sized ice pack.

But now he had a tiny bell threaded on a silver hoop earring, a necromantic spell circle drawn in chalk in the basement of his house, and a recently-completed soul-binding ritual.

Lup thread the earring gently through the hole in his ear, settling the bell right next to the cartilage. Then she lit her fingers white-hot and pressed down on the ring, welding it closed. Instinctively, Kravitz flicked his ear away from her touch, but she held on, and the jolt made the bell tinkle softly. It was right next to his ear, so quiet Lup probably hadn’t heard it, but Kravitz did.

Immediately, his fleshbody form felt more solid. He took a deep breath, felt his lungs fill easily, flexed his fingers to check the range of motion. Lup and Barry watched him intently, Barry with his pencil poised over his notebook.

“How do you feel?” Lup asked.

“Good,” said Kravitz, surprised at how much he meant it.

“Try shifting forms now,” said Barry.

Kravitz did. It was like swimming through treacle, heavy and viscous. Once he managed to take his raven form, though, it felt substantial and real, the bell and link snug around one ankle. He ruffled his feathers, shook his talons a bit, heard the surprisingly deep ringing. When he pushed his way incorporeal, the bell vanished as well.

He solidified back into his default shape and ran his fingers over the earring. It was… strange. He felt simultaneously less formless and more synthetic.

He thought his hands might be cold again. He wasn’t struggling to breathe, because he didn’t feel the need to breathe.

“Still good, boss?” Lup asked.

“I think it worked,” Kravitz said, in lieu of answering.

“Try the circle now,” said Barry. “That’s the real test.”

Kravitz, warily, stepped one foot and then the other into the sigil. The barriers went up instantly, dust motes trapping him, but he didn’t have that same immediate dissipation. It was like touching lightning, a little bit, but he stayed whole and solid, his form consistent and unwavering.

He rubbed a hole in one of the lines and the barrier fell.

“Well, another job well done for the corvid crew!” Lup crowed, throwing her hands up. “Easy-peasy, huh?”

Kravitz smiled and said nothing, but he did not fully agree.

* * *

 He slipped back to the Astral Plane fairly quickly after that conversation, wandered the records halls for a bit, and then made his way to the central chamber. He showed the Raven Queen his new jewelry with a small amount of trepidation. He had changed his form, possibly permanently; this physicality he had was new, and full of tradeoffs, and not what She had designed.

She was wearing humanoid form today. It was Her favorite quasi-mortal shape; Her half mask shielded Her face, but what parts of Her were visible looked a lot like Kravitz.

He thought that maybe She was trying to tell him something. He liked seeing himself in the shape of Her mouth, the proportions of Her hands matching his own. The way her cheekbones curved like his curved.

She ran her fingers over the tip of his ear, and he knew She heard the bell chime.

She said nothing, but words mattered little to the dead. He laid his head against Her leg as She tied his hair up and the darkness settled around him like peat and mist.

He didn’t fade into it like he used to.

It was fine, really it was. It was just that, brilliant arcanists though they were, necromancy was not the twins’ specialty. They didn’t quite understand how unusual Kravitz was, how unusual Lup and Barry were. Liches were inherently unstable, often lost themselves to the magic, lost their morals and their values until they were pure self-interest. The … situation… in the Felicity Wilds had only been unusual in the power of the liches running it, the length of time they’d evaded being caught. The complex cruelty was par for the course in the cruelty aspect, unusual in its complexity. Barry understood, but Barry also didn't really care.

Death changed you. Kravitz himself was mostly unrecognizable from who he had been as a live person. He had just managed to turn into someone he liked. Most people called him lawful neutral (except Taako, who called him “lawful chaotic”), but he was sure he was doing the right thing.

Kravitz didn’t think Lup had quite connected that her lich form was much more similar to Kravitz’s entire existence than her fleshbody. She tended to focus on the corporeality aspect — Kravitz was tangible. But he was a memory, an emotion, light, much like a lich was pure magic.

Lup knew what it was like to change your physical form into something that better represented who you were. A spell, some hormones, and she’d never looked back because she experienced no downsides. The indisputably correct choice for her, though she’d never presumed to tell others how to handle their transition.

She and Barry sometimes forgot that they were dead. They remembered that they were liches, sure; Barry had perfected the art of repressing his emotions until he could process them glacially slowly. Lup hated small spaces, slept with a nightlight on, no blinds on her windows, and music playing. But they each had settled into corporeality again like their cloned bodies were never empty. They now existed physically much like anyone else.

Kravitz could have probably possessed a dead body. He had never tried. 

* * *

 

“I wanna go for a walk,” Taako told him when he got back.

“A walk?” Kravitz asked.

“A mosey, a stroll, a _promenade_ ,” Taako waved his hand vaguely. “There’s a new arcane bookshop I wanna check out. I heard there was a cello choir at the park today, too.” He hooked his arm through Kravitz’s and tugged him out the front door.

“Do I have a choice in this?” Kravitz asked.

“Nope!” said Taako, cheerily.

He steered Kravitz down the street. The cello choir was quite loud, and the wind blew the sound right towards them so that it was perfectly audible by the time they reached the hill overlooking the park.

It was a very nice wind. There were a few ravens chasing each other through the sky, using it to boost their speed. Kravitz’s fingers twitched.  
Taako looked at him, at the ravens, and back at him.

“Oh, go on,” he said. “I’ll get my own books. Go play with your birds. Menace an eagle or something for me, okay?”

Kravitz grinned at him and took off running down the hill, the wind whistling through his hair and the bell, and then he shifted, hurtling through that viscous pressure, and caught the next updraft with his wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! I'm not super happy with how much these chapters vary in length, but hey.  
> I didn't realize this until one of my Cyborg Machines went off while I was editing this, but I guess I have a lot of thoughts on how sometimes you modify your body because it's the best thing for you, but often it comes with a cost. Sometimes that cost is weird tubes in your body that periodically catch on doorknobs. Sometimes that cost is less freedom to switch between the various forms you, as an eldritch being, can take.  
> Shockingly, no overt poetry references this chapter.  
> Trivia corner:  
> Vitiligo facts is almost always symmetrical and/or confined to one half of the body! This symmetry is one of the things that distinguishes it from other disorders of skin hyper- or hypopigmentation.  
> I mentioned it in the comments of the last chapter, but these bells are shameless Abhorsen ripoffs. Yes, apparently Kravitz is Mogget in this scenario.  
> The "Vampire of Lugnano" was buried with a rock in their mouth, presumably to stop them from spreading cholera; it's a really interesting old practice. It's also almost exactly fifteen hundred years old, so!

**Author's Note:**

> Next chapter -- multiple rules of medical ethics are broken.  
> General notes:  
> I'm not a huge fan of "mysterious terminal illness with vague symptoms" so to be clear Kravitz died from pulmonary complications of systemic lupus -- vitiligo is an autoimmune condition and there's some evidence that there's a link between the two.  
> The song the Raven Queen sings is Aisling's Song from the Secret of Kells, and Kravitz quotes George Abraham. --  
> Because I’m writing in English, I’m treating English as Common and therefore Old Common and Middle Common are just Old and Middle English. The Old English sample is Caedmon’s Prayer, and the Middle English sample is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Great Vowel Shift is a real thing that happened, although I was not accurate with the exact sound changes. I'm not a linguist, I do biology.  
> Kravitz Gets Confused And Upset By Moving Pictures is a possible prequel to this.  
> I'm @coldwind-shiningstars on Tumblr and Pillowfort, come watch my building excitement about turtles with brain damage.


End file.
